Harry Potter: Last of the Ancients - Book 2
by Karmic Acumen
Summary: Harry Potter travels the multiverse in order to acquire new technology and allies, in preparation for dealing with the enemies of his ancestors once and for all. Or at least that was the original plan.
1. Chapter 1: Random Dispatcher

**A/N:** You may or may not be familiar with the story "Harry Potter: Last of the Ancients" by BabyBoy349. Whatever the case, you're about to get a crash course.

After reading that story and liking the concept, I contacted the author and asked permission to pick up where he left off. He agreed, and I even ran this first chapter by him before I posted it.

I fully intend to keep working on my other stories, but needs must, you understand.

**Here's a summary of HP:LOA story if you haven't read it or did it a long time ago and forgot the core stuff:**

The premise is that Janus and Ganos La from the Stargate show managed to perfect dimensional technology ages ago and looked through the multiverse until they found a dimension where the Ori didn't exist (and the Alteran race in general didn't exist, really). The two led a number of their Alteran brethren to that dimension. Stuff happened, Ganos La became known as Morgan la Fey somehow (and she may or may not have later returned to her original dimension) while Janus became known as Merlin in myths (Moros may or may not have proceeded to become Merlin in the Stargate dimension as usual while this was happening).

One of Janus' Alteran powers was precognition (Like Jonas Quinn had for a while due to Nirrti using that DNA sequencing device). He foresaw that, thousands of years after he ascended, a child would be born from both his and Ganos La's lines and he would somehow have full Alteran DNA.

Obviously, Harry turned out to be said child.

In this universe, he left on the Horcrux Hunt on his own in the night and, after a while of wandering, ended up visiting Gringotts, where the (you guessed it) inheritance test revealed his status and prompted the helpful goblins to take him to a ring platform in the bowels of the bank. Long story short Harry meets a Janus hologram, downloads an entire Alteran repository in his head and decides to use the Dimensional Drive to visit other realities in the hopes that he'd find civilizations that advanced along different lines than the Alterans, thus getting an edge against the Ori who would have evolved similarly.

The D-drive having the power to double as a time travel device meant he could appear at the exact moment of departure whenever he decided to return and deal with Voldemort.

**The journey went like this:**

Harry goes to the Babylon 5 universe just as the war with the Shadows is about to start. Stuff happens and he leaves that dimension with plans for the new Minbari-Vorlon ships and the bio-robotic self-adaptive armor. He also sends a bunch of missiles through hyperspace to the Shadow homeworld to bomb them into the stone age. Make of that what you will.

Harry next goes to the Star Wars dimension just as Luke destroys the Death Star. He runs into Yoda, later meets Luke and trains as a Jedi even though his powers are different. When Luke gets the vision, he takes Camelot (his City Ship which is basically Atlantis on Steroids) into the extra-galactic void and takes it back in time 3 years to give them both enough time to train and become Jedi knights. In the end he goes to Bespin with his ship and helps Luke fight Vader for a while, then uses Telepathy to break through Darth Sidious' mind control (apparently, Darth Vader's real self was caged in his own mind) and free him with some psychic help from Luke, Leia and Padme's force ghost.

Later, Harry departs that dimension and leaves Luke and Anakin Skywalker (with a perfectly new, cloned body) in charge of a space station and Darth Vader's captured fleet.

The story "ends" after Harry returns to his home dimension (accompanied by a rejuvenated Yoda) and deals with Voldemort and his goons. And that's where I'm picking it up.

* * *

><p><strong>Harry Potter: Last of the Ancients<strong>

**Book 2**

"-. .-"

**Chapter 1: Random Dispatcher**

"-. .-"

The main research lab in the City Ship Camelot was the place where many an experiment had been conducted. Or at least that's what the owner would be able to claim in a few years. As it was, even with the three years that passed in a certain galaxy far far away (a whole dimensional barrier away, as it turned out), the area wasn't as cluttered with projects or the remains of projects as it could have been. Not different ones in any case.

A situation that was rapidly changing. Not because of there suddenly being a swell in simultaneous research endeavors (which hadn't happened, strangely enough, despite the owner no longer being all alone up there), but because of the sheer quantity of failed versions of the same damn thing.

Harry James Potter tossed away the rod he was working on and tried not to let his disgust show. He really did his best to hold it in, but it was a futile effort in the end. He barely registered the foot-long, two-inch-thick metal stick landing on the tabletop and rolling until it fell to the floor and away. That was the fortieth prototype. The fortieth attempt that yielded absolutely no results whatsoever.

In hindsight, it figured that the thrice-damned spell matrix generator would be the thing that finally drove him up the wall. Besides the biggest projects like the failed Arcturus reactor, the most innocuous things often became the biggest sources of apoplectic rage. History should have taught him that.

One would think that, out of everything he had going on, the whole business with installing a new regime in Magical Britain would be the biggest source of frustration for him, but no! With his Voldemort homunculus summarily eliminating the so-called dark side's entire manpower (by way of Dark Mark summoning into an ambush site covered with stunning wave dischargers), the new government of Magical Britain was already stabilizing after just a month of peace and quiet. The ICW, meanwhile, was nodding their heads while going about their own business as usual.

Originally, the plan was to use the Voldemort homunculus to control the bad side of the conflict while coaxing the greater part of Magical Britain to fight back over the course of a protracted conflict. But subsequent talks with Master Yoda and a simulation created by his city's AI showed that it wouldn't really help that much since it would still fall to the younger generations to change the overall mindset in the end. With that coming to light, it was agreed after a meeting with Kingsley that expediting the end of the conflict would be more beneficial, provided that the new "school for the gifted" gained a following quickly enough among the people who hadn't had enough time to become bigots.

It did mean he had to build the prison on the bottom of the Atlantic sooner than expected, but that was straightforward enough thanks to replicators.

As far as his space infrastructure went, Harry had had it all planned out even before he came back to clean up the mess in Britain, so he didn't have anything left to prepare for his soon-to-be-resumed multiversal trek. So no stress from that direction either. The logic of "third time's the charm" would normally come into play here, given his luck, and make some problem or other crop up from the direction of Camelot's new denizens. But lo and behold! That didn't happen either. The few friends that had agreed to accompany him on his further adventures were too busy assimilating the basic knowledge kit that Silima had managed to compile for them. They'd had to spend a week or two integrating the knowledge by skimming relevant texts and "remembering" the information, since their brains weren't as advanced as his. Whatever else interested them would have to be picked up the old fashioned way from then on.

For the goblins it went even slower as even less data was possible to just download into their minds, since their physiology and brain chemistry was even less compatible with the technology. Harry and Camelot's AI had done their best, but there were limitations to how much the technology could be adapted. Mostly because the brain itself had to do half the job. Having to compensate for the lack of advanced mind processes and psychic abilities naturally came with pitfalls.

Harry let his head hang back as far as he could, even leaning back in his chair enough to teeter dangerously. Silima hadn't been very appeased when he insisted on keeping the earth-standard rotating office chair on wheels instead of something more up to date (and less likely to tip over and crash). But in the end he was the boss so he got his way. He had almost made a quip about liking to live "on the edge" but decided against it. As accommodating as his city's AI had decided to be, Harry didn't want to test and see if she was as fickle as living and breathing women were.

Now he almost wished for an outlet to snarl a few invectives at. Even after abandoning the palm crystal shape in favor of something more wand-like, the spell matrix generator still refused to work. Hours upon hours of scanning "spell lights" were turning out to have been a monumental waste of time.

He honestly didn't understand what the problem was. The project originally started as a whim of his but it proved more of a challenge than anything else to date, and even after three weeks of single-minded focus (and minimum sleep, which Master Yoda was going to grill him for later, again) he was still stumped. By all accounts the technology built the energy matrixes to be perfectly identical to the ones that defined a successful spell, but they dissipated the instant they were formed.

Well, unless the SMGs were held by him or one of his wizard or witch friends. Then they performed like wands. Exactly like wands. Weaker than the actual ones they owned, but wands nonetheless. It made no sense!

It didn't help that when, right at the start, he personally got excellent results with the original SMG design it had made him think he'd successfully created a device that could cast any spell by using zero point energy. So much for that pipe dream.

With something between a shriek of exasperation and a sigh of resignation, Harry Potter pulled himself to his feet and tossed one final glare at the pile of useless garbage that his SMGs had turned out to be, then he made for the door. He'd long since ordered Silima and all other AI "helpers" to turn themselves mute to the goings on in the design lab or off while he was there. Of course, that only meant she had more time to decide the most thorough approach to delivering her "observations" once he finally came out for air.

It was the reason why he hadn't yet beamed himself to the now slightly more used dining room in the central spire: every second spent walking from his workbench to the door was another second away from her blatantly disapproving critique.

If only his main travel companions had his back during those sessions of not-scolding. But no, Hermione and Padma agreed with Silima every time, Luna never said anything immediately helpful (for him), Neville didn't think it was his place to speak, and Anthony, Dean and Dennis stayed out of it because they didn't want to have the girls go after them next. Their snickering at his expense was never subtle either, the bastards.

Maybe it was a good thing Malfoy had changed his mind about coming. Seeing him and the others agree on anything would have been too surreal for words.

Putting his game face on, Harry finally took the final step over the nonexistent threshold and waited.

Nothing happened.

Frowning at the distinct lack of the "try to pace yourself better and delegate tasks more" speech from his city's AI, Harry reached out with his mind and connected with Camelot's mainframe. His eyebrows shot up when he didn't find the AI in the system, so he immediately beamed himself to the command deck in the city's central spire. Once there, he was quite surprised to find Hermione manning one of the consoles and scrolling through a holoscreen. The main control chair would remain his alone to access for the foreseeable future, but other, nonessential systems had been made accessible to the others.

"What's going on?" He asked as he walked up to her.

To his surprise, Hermione turned to him with a rueful expression that spoke of something _he'd_ done wrong instead of something on her end. "Today is when Silima undergoes total code review. You might remember it from, you know, having scheduled it yourself."

Harry winced openly at that.

For all their advancements, the Alterans still had their difficulties developing their best technologies for a time. More relevantly, it took a thousand years to eliminate or offset every little imperfection or limitation in their AI coding. Long-term integrity of AIs was one area that posed problem for a long time, with glitches sometimes cropping up. King Arthur, the AI he'd left back on the space station in the Jedi dimension, wasn't a fully self-aware entity, only a really smart program, and it was set to basically scrub itself and reset to its initial state every twelve years. The prime directives were stored on a separate data crystal within the mainframe, but the AI's whole code would be reset periodically.

Harry couldn't remember a case of an AI going rampant during the later centuries of the Lantean age, but by then the protocol of periodic purging was a standard safety measure that didn't take that much time and came with no risks, so all of the ships and facilities large enough to use or need such a complex AI often went with it. During the last century in the Pegasus Galaxy, the issue almost became moot because of ships' tendency to not live long enough for the matter to come up.

Silima was something new he'd created. A truly complex virtual entity that had grown from only some initial guidelines he'd provided the city's main data core. It had taken over three years for the awareness to mature, but it had been a success. A way for him to always have a companion in case his plans fell through and he really did end up traveling the rest of the multiverse all by himself, like he'd started. Due to the existence of (he assumed) true self-awareness, Harry was sure rampancy wouldn't be an issue, but it seemed Silima wanted to conduct checks on herself just to be sure.

Yearly.

Harry wondered if it was because of the stuff that had happened while he did travel alone, and which Silima had thoroughly reviewed and analyzed in the time since her onlining. Though the thought his city would take precautions because it/she didn't trust Harry to be careful enough himself didn't really sit well with him.

Maybe he was overthinking it.

Then again, he had just allowed this matter to slip his mind after being the one to schedule it, even if it had been at Silima's own suggestion.

"Right," Harry coughed in his fist. "So, how are the readings?"

Hermione was rueful for an entirely different reason this time. "So long as I don't start seeing code written in bright pink with green and yellow polka dots we're clear." She shook her head. "Honestly, Harry, I'm really just holding the fort here. The starting data pack you had the ship shove into our heads was amazing, but the programming primer there didn't have anything nearly as advanced as what I'm looking at here. I've thought of looking up some more materials, but I forgot to ask Silima to bring up a VI tutor before she shut down for the code analysis. And whatever thoughts I had about searching for one myself kind of fell to the wayside when everything in here refused to do anything else than what you're seeing."

Harry blinked at the long stream of words that had barely taken two breaths. "And where are the others?" He didn't bring up the fact that most of the databases and (of course) the main data core was still inaccessible to anyone but him and would stay that way.

"Eating. Since, you know, it's dinner time. I finished early."

Harry sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. Even he'd been going for a bit too long without food by this point. "Right. I think I'll rename the Jedi Spire to Spire of Learning just so no one has to ask again where they should go when wanting to learn stuff. Come on, I'll take you to a holographic classroom and you can pull up whatever learning materials you want. I know your mnemonics are great, but I think a brain booster shot will still help with the data absorption rate and retention if nothing else."

Brain Booster Drug, or BBD, was the name he'd whimsically chosen for a (watered-down when applied to non-Alterans) version of a drug that would temporarily optimize brain operation. It could overwork synapses to the point of irreparable neuron damage if taken too much or often, but it was a viable complementary measure to the infodump that had proven insufficient. The drug had actually been used by many of his people to achieve ascension, sometimes beyond what safety guidelines suggested, when getting that last percent of brain activity was needed to finally go over the 93% threshold required.

When you were dying from an incurable plague already, little things like possible brain damage didn't really register as concerns anymore.

Once he commanded the transporter system to beam them to the corridor just outside their intended destination, Harry went through the motions of directing Hermione's knowledge-devouring tendencies in a productive fashion. All the while, he pondered the current situation. There seemed to be no way to adapt the data repository technology for better use than it already had been. You could either use enough of your brain to receive the information or you couldn't. Unless you forced the issue and doomed yourself to a slow death by mental degeneration and eventual failure.

His friends _were_ witches and wizards though, and they seemed to have a special part of the brain dedicated to storing the muscle memory and mental process behind every spell successfully learned, so the data transfer of all the effect matrixes that Harry had compiled had been transferred successfully to all his human friends. They couldn't do them wandlessly like he could, but it still put them above most wizards in terms of sheer spell knowledge at least.

Everybody would still have to invest time into learning their specialties it seemed.

The idea of structured learning in a classroom had been scrapped early on. The seven people that were going to come with him on his adventure still had things to sort out on the planet and were coming and going all the time, and their areas of interest were too far apart. Neville was all about hydroponics and bringing some plant and animal life to the city beyond the grass and trees that his ancestors had included in the (admittedly expansive) parks. That hadn't been a surprise. What had been was finding out that he also seemed interested in the Alteran history, particularly the military side. Although given his parents and what he'd been preparing to do at Hogwarts in Harry's absence…

The others hadn't really decided what their areas of focus should be. Sure, with the equivalent of Alteran general education now in their minds they were starting to show inclinations. Well, some of them were. Dennis Creevy was still not over his wide-eyed fascination with everything, Padma Patil was more focused on spending the days with her twin sister in the time she had left than figuring out where she would fit in the expedition. Anthony Goldstein seemed pretty fascinated with ships, but that seemed to extend to everything Alterans built that was bigger than he was, so it was pretty inconclusive.

Okay, so maybe his friends weren't actually showing special propensities that much. Other than Hermione who was studious and eager to learn as ever, and seemed to be quite dead set on figuring out how an AI worked and, thus, had basically dedicated herself to learning everything there was to know about Alteran software programming.

Once he left Hermione to her holodesk, Harry backed out of the otherwise empty classroom and released a deep breath. It seemed that his traveling companions would be just that: traveling companions and nothing else. For a good long while.

Well, he'd already decided that companionship was a must, and that Master Yoda wouldn't be enough all by himself. Even if his tendency to forget about the passage of time while he worked on his projects did seem to suggest otherwise.

On a related note, Alteran brain interfacing technology couldn't mentally interact with Yoda's species at all. Tests on a cloned piece of his brain showed the brain cells reacting rather… badly to any incoming attempt. Yes, somehow cloning and healing worked, but affecting what was on the brain cells did not. It might have been an extension of him being almost impossible to mindread through the Force. Harry's own telepathy mostly couldn't get through either. Fortunately, Master Yoda never had any plans to have any info dumped right inside his head to begin with, and he seemed fine with learning magic the normal way too. And since the city AI could run all systems with minimal input, he could fill in for Harry during a space battle if ever the time came when he'd have to be on the ground, like on Cloud City, even without using the Control Chair.

At least there was one reliable person up there with him.

Harry had himself beamed to the dining room in the central spire and offered a tired smile to the other occupants before sitting down to have something himself. Maybe a full stomach would help him figure out what to do next.

He wasn't going to the Alteran home dimension with his companions so scatter-brained and unprepared, that was for sure. He'd honestly expected… well, at this point he wasn't sure what he expected. Maybe using a program loaded into the orb he used to "judge" the "worthiness" of the prospective crew members hadn't been such a good idea. If he'd actually sat down to talk with everyone, telepathy or no, he might have known what to expect instead of being blindsided by the situation he was in now.

"-. .-"

It soon became apparent that the SMG wasn't going to be the only source of frustration. The second source was related. It happened while he was planet-side for a meeting with the new magical government. While he was there, the goblin delegation – which had moved to Camelot as dictated by the alliance with Gringotts – set about warding the building (well, more like building underworks) that had been assigned as their embassy/headquarters. They went about things in the usual manner which had worked just fine for generations. Unfortunately, despite the rune stones being set up properly, and the casting happening without issue, the attempt failed. Instead of the whole structure being blanketed in the usual security measures, they got bubbles around each ward stone of about four feet in width from the stone surface, but nothing else.

Everyone had been confused and worried by the outcome, and Harry offered to be nearby and make some on-site scans while they tried again, only for the procedure to work perfectly, save for two particular wards whose underlying workings Harry wasn't familiar with. This led to general bafflement, especially once the results of the scans came in and informed everyone that whatever the cause was, it was something that none of Camelot's extensive sensors could pick up.

Considering that those were the same sensors that could detect the Force, that was a shock to the system. At least it somewhat appeased his annoyance over not getting the SMGs to work, not that he shared that feeling with anyone.

They duplicated the experiment with Harry off Camelot, and they again got the odd failure. Then they tested the attempt while another witch or wizard was nearby, with Harry still absent. The simpler wards seemed to engage successfully, but the complex ones didn't, though Hermione and, oddly enough, Luna seemed to allow for more success if they were in the immediate area.

On a hunch, Harry got Ragnok to approve of the Goblins and the human curse breakers in their employ teaching him all they knew about warding over the course of a month. Thanks to how Ward Master Grimgit literally fawned over Silima and Alteran technology in general (and Harry in particular) after Camelot's scans helped reveal some sites warded in ways that had been lost to time, the agreement came without any of the usual grumbling. Once Harry knew all they had to share, he had the Goblins tear down everything they'd set in place and start over.

The warding procedure finally worked as intended. Further tests established that as long as Harry was anywhere on Camelot's surface, distance wasn't an issue so he could be doing whatever he wanted and the Goblins could do their own jobs as well, so long as he understood exactly what they were doing and had the ability to do the same thing himself, even if he wasn't present for or aware of their activities at the time.

It was pretty ironic that a direct tie between wizardkind and magical phenomena was finally revealed. The implications were rather frightening for the Goblins, though Harry was impressed by how they never allowed it to show on their faces.

The dangers to house-elves were even greater.

Bonded house elves couldn't hear their master's call from space, or from the planet if they were brought to Camelot via shuttle. Worse, if the elf's actual master and Harry both left the city at the same time, and the elf wasn't near a wizard, a witch or VERY close to a goblin, they lost their power and (fortunately not immediately) their lives as well. If Silima hadn't been keeping some sensors on everyone in the city and performed an emergency transport of Nevile's poor elf to the medical level of the Spire of Learning, she'd have died right then. It was lucky that Padma was already there.

The event definitely killed all immediate plans of creating a magical creature habitat.

Harry decided to hold off on drawing a conclusion after so many of his initial ones had been proven incorrect during his relatively short trip through creation. While he did have some pretty likely assumptions, he needed more information and long-term observation.

In the meantime, he had a third annoyance to fume over. One that was completely unexpected.

Up till then the Vorlon organic-metallic ship armor had lived up to its reputation at being capable to "learn from experience." While it did seem to have a limit as to how much punishment it could take once it adapted to a certain type of damage (especially if it was a thin sheet), it had definitely delivered on Ambassador Delenn's promises. Harry had already treated the test piece with every energy weapon he had, and the eventual result was a couple inches-thick sheet with an area of two square feet that could only be overcome by prolonged exposure to two simultaneous Alteran energy lasers. Sure, full-scale, live firing tests would probably not yield the same results, but it was still impressive since it meant that any ship coated with the mastered compound would be able to shrug off a fair bit of unfocused fire by dissipating it across the outer hull.

He'd carried a sample of the armor around with him in Hogwarts for a few days, assuming that exposure to a magically-charged environment would teach it to resist magic. That didn't work, since the energy field didn't register as damage in the first place, so Harry eventually had to go ahead and start firing spells at the poor thing.

The results were bizarre.

Oh, a stream of (normal) fire may as well not have been there and absolute-zero blizzards had no effect (not that the last one was a surprise, with the vacuum of space being so cold itself). Lightning was also fully dissipated. But even the weakest reductors always blew a hole or crumbled the armor to pieces, cutting curses worked fine even after repeated strikes, cutting _charms_ worked, and transfiguration didn't seem to get any harder over time either. Moreover, every Bombarda, Bombarda Maxima or other bludgeoning spell invariably turned the armor sheet into a battered and crumpled shadow of its former self.

Maybe it wasn't fair to the poor technological wonder. Harry's power level was huge after all. And similar spells from the others didn't work nearly as well, or sometimes at all. Nevertheless, the lack of improvement on the armor's part was frustrating to the extreme.

The bouts of incredulity didn't help, but Harry couldn't resist that reaction when the armor that had become all but invulnerable to a sustained superlaser blast actually experienced a rise in temperature when subjected to a mere cooking charm. It was mindboggling.

The test had actually been a joke, a way for him to blow off some steam after the unbelievable results, but it ended up inflicting upon him a mild form of shock instead. After a while he recovered and continued to experiment.

"Lacero."

The sheet of armor split in two. Again. Like every other of the 133 times he tried it.

"Reparo."

The cut immediately vanished and the two halves were whole again.

Harry slowly breathed in and out through his nose and reminded himself that he had perfect control of his powers and the ability to put more of it into a single spell matrix than all his friends put together, and then some. A normal witch or wizard wouldn't be able to do more than leave a large gash that didn't fully penetrate, and even that would take effort.

Unfortunately, it didn't work. "Confringo!" he snarled, even though he didn't need to vocalize any of his acts anymore. The silver-blue ball of energy as large as his palm smashed into the armor 10 feet away hard enough to wrench it from its support scaffold and scatter it into several warped chunks. "Reparo." And there it was again. Scowling, Harry levitated it back into place as he paced. Yet again he'd felt no difference in the power needed to do that. The armor wasn't adapting at all.

That did it. Fuming, he put all his annoyance into one heating charm and waved his hand at the armor.

Between the brute force of the spell and the fact that a heating charm possessed the parameter of duration, the action had the most interesting result yet. Especially since Harry had deliberately not included an upper temperature limit.

A minute later, the normally hard, tough metal with the ability to dissipate all kinds of energy and even blunt trauma began to warp. Two more minutes and it started to melt, then outright boil and drip off the support until it was a smattering of smoking sludge on the lab floor.

Having already been brought as close to apoplectic rage as his Jedi-like mentality allowed, this final test pushed Harry the rest of the cycle, leaving nothing behind but stunned amazement. "Unbe-freaking-lievable." That particular piece of armor had withstood _fiendfyre_ for two minutes before heating up enough to start losing structural integrity, but a heating charm could do it faster... A ludicrously overpowered one, sure, but still nowhere near what fiendfyre was…

It made no sense!

It was enough to make him think that Magic had deliberately gained sentience just so it could mess with him.

He'd assumed from being able to detect wards on Camelot's scanners (and even bypass them with the beaming transport system eventually) that there was nothing really "magical" about magic. But either he'd been wrong or even the Alterans hadn't advanced technology to the point where it could understand and replicate or counter the abilities that their descendants on his Earth had come up with over time.

Initially he was determined to be the first to crack the mystery, but it had been a month since his experiments began and there had been NO progress.

The worst part was that he felt like he was missing something obvious.

"Careful Harry, or the wrakspurts will burrow so far into your ears that your brain will be fuzzy for days."

Harry turned to the now open door, where the bland comment had come from. "Is that your way of telling me to take some time off, Luna?"

As always, even after having adopted the white tunic and pants of Alteran casual garb, she kept that straggly, waist-length dirty blonde hair free. Coupled with her very pale eyebrows and protuberant eyes, it gave her a permanently surprised look. "Time off? Off what? Off the city? I can't imagine you'd want to spend any more time down on the planet than you had to. I imagine the goblins would be put off if they didn't get advanced notice as well."

Even after four months of his friends and… guests… coming and going to and from the city, he still couldn't tell when Luna was being serious or not. The fact that she still wore her radish earrings and butterbeer cork necklace didn't help lessen the impact of her presence either.

Everything about her did make every conversation between her and Master Yoda an exercise in hilarity though. "I assume you're the one that got stuck with the job of reminding me to look at the time and emerge back into the light?"

Luna's half-vacant stare turned to him. She had been staring at the wall before that. The only wall in the lab that happened to be completely bare. Yeah, best not think about it too much. "I'm not sure I understand. This place is better lit than the corridor I came through."

Harry dropped his head with a sigh. Why even bother?

Then again, if Luna was deliberately acting so dense, she was doing a great job of distracting him from the cause of his aggressive urges. She was giving him a more benign type of weirdness to focus on in preparation of a lead-in to more happy thoughts. Because thinking positive thoughts was the only way to cure one's self of a wrackspurt infestation which, by extension, would make it harder for him to become afflicted with Loser's Lurgy-

Harry James Potter forced his own thoughts to a screeching halt so suddenly that he literally visualized the train wreck as it played out on his mind. Forget being worried that he could actually recognize her tactic. If he had reached the point where he automatically thought in Luna's terms then it was time to get the hell out of the lab for a while.

"Luna, what's for lunch?" They actually hadn't only been using the food dispensers because Mrs. Weasley had been sending care packages up there by way of Luna or Hermione every other day or so.

Luna fell into step with him as he passed by her. Or, well, skipped along. "Lunch? Lunch was four hours ago Harry. It's dinner now."

Great, so he'd lost track of time even worse than he had the previous day. Which in turn had been worse than the day before that and so on and so forth.

After a bit of procrastination, he mentally connected to the city and winced. Silima was giving him the silent treatment again today. She never did approve of him holing up in there, especially after he'd lamented the solitude as he traveled through dimensions on his trip. Pulling his mind away, he decided not to beam straight to his destination yet and eyed his traveling companion. "Have the others finished?"

"No, Harry. They decided to wait for you this time, no matter how long it took to drag you out of that junk yard you call lab. Dean's words, not mine." Harry frowned a bit at the implied comparison, but he supposed he _had_ allowed a lot of stuff and shrapnel to pile up. And spare parts. And rejected prototypes. And okay, two different tool sets were scattered all over the place, but it wasn't like he had trouble watching his step. And there were just four cut up engines there, and only five new sensor systems mockups, plus the pile of SMGs which might still be made to work in the future – ANYWAY! He knew exactly where everything was!

And now he was internally justifying himself. Actively.

Not a good sign.

Finally entering the transport booth, Harry mentally inputted the destination code, trying to remember the last time he'd actually spent a whole day with other people. Or at least all three meals.

It seemed his connection to the system was being observed, because his ship's AI provided the answer he was looking for as pop-up text that only he could see. Harry blinked at the date. That had been two weeks ago. Had so much time really gone by?

He resembled Janus more than he thought, and he wasn't totally convinced it was a good thing.

"-. .-"

In the end, eleven months after the end of the Second Wizarding War and one month after the opening of the Potter Campus school, he decided it was time to leave. He'd given up the SMG project as a bad job and put the magic-proofing of the Vorlon armor on the backburner until further notice. This, unfortunately, brought with it a new problem: where to jump next? There was a synch point already stored for the original dimension of the Alterans, and he'd added the ones for the Babylon 5 and the Force dimensions, but for any other universes they were mostly flying blind. There seemed to be a method to the Dimensional Drive's way of choosing the moment in time and area of space where Camelot would materialize in a dimension other than the ones stored in memory, but they were still mostly flying blind.

What could be determined was whether or not space travel was being done in the proximity of the arrival point by taking readings of the way matter behaved on a subatomic level, as well as hyperspace phenomena and whatever subspace and EM signals were being broadcasted, if any.

In the end, it was Luna that actually broke the ice and said that they should just randomize the destination frequency (while leaving the standard suite of failsafes in place of course) and head off instead of trying to look for anything specific. Even if there was no space travel or communication being done, in the forms they knew of. This was probably going to be the only jump prior to their arrival in the original dimension, so they may as well make it an adventure.

Based on his experiences in the other universes, he was confident that nothing could really threaten them, so he called everyone relevant to what would normally be the Alteran Council meeting room and put it to a vote. With his seven friends, Yoda, the goblin Wriptoc (liaison) and the other relevant goblin Grimgit (ward master), there were ten people in total besides him.

Predictably, everyone was eager to go, even though the goblins were worried of how magic would hold up away from Earth. They did agree that going ahead and seeing what would happen would be the only way forward though. Since permanent area magic that wouldn't take unless Harry was present seemed to hold up just fine afterwards (even if he beamed off Camelot), he was pretty certain wards and expanded rooms or trunks wouldn't suddenly fail.

Decision made, everyone beamed to the main control tower chamber and spread around to cover whatever systems they were most comfortable with. Harry himself took the control chair but instead of starting every system himself or letting Silima pick up the slack, he waited to see what the others would do.

With how advanced Alteran ships were, and how much could be done mentally, many of the old crew posts had merged, but only on the smaller craft. On small attack/scout hybrid vessels like the Marauder it was manageable for a single person to work, but anything bigger than that 100-meters craft and it became problematic due to how the inner systems and redundancies were set up. Control chair or no, the captain could hardly fight a battle alone. The information coming in from every one of the thousands of sensor suites on the outer hull, the many weapons that could be engaged at any one time, and the damage reports or regions where the shield was taxed or hull breached, would lead to an information influx too high for even an Alteran mind to process. And that's ignoring the fact that the captain also had to actually use the space vessel to _fight_ the battle. It was taxing enough on an Aurora-class starship of 1 by 3.5 kilometers that optimal efficiency was impossible without at least 350 crew members. There was a reason the standard complement was of 500 strong. Needless to say, a City Ship like Atlantis and Camelot itself had even more data to sort.

Having a true AI like Silima there made up for the lack of sector operation and maintenance crews, but it wasn't a perfect solution, and the expectation that the shield couldn't be breached by anything so long as there was power mitigated most issues, since the readings coming in from the systems throughout most of the city could be ignored in a pinch. Well, barring those from transportation drives, power cores and inertial dampeners.

Harry had deliberately not explained which suite would normally belong to each primary crew member of the ship. He'd also removed that information from the data repository everyone had downloaded into their brains at the very start, and issued a standing order to the AI to refrain from divulging that information. Instead, he allowed his friends simulated access to the secondary consoles during the months while Camelot orbited Earth on the other side of the moon. That way they could find where they fit best without any feelings of inadequacy or self-importance (if any) getting in the way.

Harry had expected Hermione to immediately head for the Executive Officer post, but Neville did that instead, he noted with well concealed amazement. He wondered if his friend would have been so eager to become the one responsible for the safety and security of the entire ship and crew if Camelot actually had anything resembling an actual population.

Hermione settled at the console showing the general day-to-day operations of the ship as well as cargo management. That was the job of the Operations Officer, which essentially put her as the third in command. Harry thought it fit in well with her ability to organize the living lights out of any predicament she encountered. He was just glad she'd given up her scrolls and notebooks in favor of holopads.

Anthony was probably interested in having as much access as he could to the view outside and sensor readings of everything out in space when he commandeered the console responsible for navigation, guidance, FTL jumps, piloting, course corrections, atmospheric entries and flight planning. Whether he'd make a competent third mate / flight officer remained to be seen. Then again, if Harry remembered correctly that did align with Anthony's childhood dream of becoming an astronaut.

Dennis was a bit hesitant in approaching what he didn't know was the flight overseer's post, but if any of his brother Colin's propensity for finding the best angles and light (when he took photos) carried over and translated into a good grasp of astrography and spatial positioning, Dennis would be a competent enough Navigator in time. He'd have to collaborate with Dean, who'd taken over the Sensors Calibration & Flight Command Systems (meaning that he'd manage the sensors and do most of the avionics work) but Harry wasn't going to accept anything less than full cooperation from everyone on board anyway.

He noticed that Padma had sat at the First Helmsman's post, who would be the lead pilot and leader of the flight department, but she wasn't looking at the console at all. Instead, she was staring out the window, excited to see hyperspace for the first time. And Earth from Orbit, that too. Harry already knew she'd been spending more time in the medical and biological research level than up there, so she was probably going to become the physician of their little expedition, and there wasn't a post on the main deck for someone like that. Not on any Alteran ship except science and relief vessels anyway.

That left Luna, who actually took over the Data Collection & Management Technician position and was soon scrolling through the readings shown on the holoscreen in front of her. Watching her, Harry's eyebrows went higher the more seconds passed. Unless he was mistaken, she was carrying out the mandatory database integrity check and active memory and program diagnostic required before the start and after the end of every mission.

Somehow, the owner of the Alteran City Ship Camelot had the feeling that she'd oversee data gathering systems and databases just fine. Maybe he'd also hand her control of the computer systems and cyberwarfare suites and see what happened.

Harry had a moment when he imagined an electronic war with an Ori ship on one end and Luna in an Aurora-class vessel on the other. He lacked the information and disposition to lay the scenario out in his mind, but he felt a chill go down his spine anyway.

Right. Best they just be off.

…

Oh, what the hell. With a mental command, he slaved the computer system and cyberwarfare ops to the database console. Luna didn't even bat an eyelash when the extra UI literally pushed its way into her holoscreen.

Well it _was_ high time something surprised him positively.

"Right," Harry leaned back in his chair. "Systems check report."

"Main data core green, integrity at 98%," Luna said immediately. She ignored the surprised looks that the others threw her. "It could use a capacity upgrade though." Harry was at the center of the room, but her station faced that direction so she only had to look up in order to address him directly. "I'd normally suggest that you archive the older research data, since it would free up 35% of the main core. But when you created Silima you specifically intended for her to have real-time access to every byte stored on Camelot. Archiving anything at this point would just be detrimental to her performance."

Well, so much for thinking Hermione was the one with the biggest affinity for all things software. "How much free space is there right now?" He could just mentally ask the chair. Actually he already knew, but the others needed some training, and since they'd all declined entering a virtual reality via stasis pods he had to do it the old fashioned way. At least he'd managed to involve them in a few drills.

"18.002%." So she knew well enough not to skip the decimals. With .001% being the equivalent of a zettabyte, that meant… "There's still sufficient space for our needs, but since you're planning a long-term deployment you might want to do an upgrade sooner rather than later."

Harry wondered if the others were surprised at her apparent skill or the fact that she didn't sound as dreamy or distant as usual. "Acknowledged." He'd do it just before leaving the dimension. He then turned to Dean. "Avionics?"

Dean blinked, startled to have been singled out. "Erm, good? I mean systems green." He frowned at the text in front of him. "Active scans by our cloaked probe and Internet hacks seem to have caused enough web traffic that Earth's big data carriers expect some pretty hefty losses and share value drop though." A mental nudge switched it to passive and made Dean blink at the status change as it showed on his holoscreen. "Right. I don't suppose we'll be paying compensation?"

"Like they could ever find out who did it," Hermione piped in, displaying a prodigious privation of proper procedure propensity.

"If they do, they deserve our money," Anthony chimed in. "Given the past though…"

"Stay on topic people," Harry said.

"Right," Anthony nodded. "Why are we doing this again? You can do everything from the control chair, and AIs and replicators have been doing everything else just fine so far. You seem to prefer them to human help anyway."

Harry internally winced at the innocent comment about him preferring AI to human contact. "Because it won't always be Camelot. It might be a ship, it might be that we'll be on separate vessels. It might be that I'll be incapacitated or killed and you'll have to do without me. And it might be that we'll be swarmed by space flobberworms. In such a situation, the Captain's role will be purely proactive. In other words, I'll dish out the damage and you make sure we stay alive long enough to win or retreat." It was actually a lot more complicated than that, since the Captain could also make snap decisions like divert power from one system to the other or activate a local self-destruct or isolation protocol. But for that to be possible and done quick enough to matter, the Captain's mind had to be as clear and unburdened as possible.

"Such pleasant thoughts," Dean muttered.

"Well, I do fully expect to go to war eventually," Harry shrugged. "Anyway. Navigator!" Dennis jumped in his seat. "Set a course at sublight speeds to the edge of the Sol System."

Dennis took a deep breath and pasted a sickly expression on his face. Maybe it finally dawned on him what that chair he'd sat on meant.

It took around ten minutes and a fair number of direct interventions on Harry's part before Dennis finally managed to complete his first order as navigator. Maybe eventually his post would be made official. A long time down the line. As it was, Harry's on-screen remote assistance tutorial had done most of the work, though it might just have been the first-time stress.

It was a good thing that actual piloting and mid-battle spatial positioning and maneuvering was the First Helmman's job though. The Navigator was a sort of co-pilot during those times. Of course, since the Chief Pilot's post was unoccupied, it fell to Harry to fill in for it, like he did for the rest of the dozen posts still left open. "Course set and acknowledged. Activating sublight engines."

"Sublight engines…" Dennis waited until the rune on the screen changed, "…activated. No issues. Adjusting for acceleration… the ETA is 5.7 hours."

The next five minutes were spent gazing at the splendid form of the Earth and how it soon got smaller and smaller once Camelot begun its interplanetary trip. Harry had his chair tip backwards and called up a hologram in the large space above him reserved for just that function.

"This is going to be a hell of a wait," Anthony grouched, slouching in his seat. The nonexistent ship captain inside Harry winced at the utter lack of discipline shown by his "crew," such as it was. Cream of the crop they definitely were not. "I know we're going slow just so we can get back fast in case any of the magical stuff and goblins on board fail or die, but-"

"I am honored by your concern," Wriptoc sarcastically growled from where he stood with Grimgit on _top_ of the otherwise unmanned engineering console. "But I fear whatever dreams you have of seeing our demise with your own eyes will go unfulfilled."

"Why?" Anthony asked suspiciously. "I mean, goblin lifespan is shorter than that of witches and wizards. And you already expressed your disdain for all forms of divination, so you couldn't have foreseen that." He narrowed his eyes. "You aren't planning to overthrow us and take Camelot for yourselves are you? Either that or you intend to have my eyes gouged out the moment you fall over, just so I don't get to witness it happ -"

Dean coughed into his fist.

Harry reached up and grabbed the bridge of his nose. Anthony had this problem of his paranoid imagination going out of control at the strangest times.

Then again, this was one of his less rampant theories.

"Don't be silly, Anthony." Luna said dreamily. "They won't gouge them out. Their standard retribution for enemies who've deliberately insulted them is to pour acid down their eye sockets while applying healing magic and strengthening potions in order to prevent damage being done to the rest of them and shortening the retribution by allowing the mercy of death." Dead silence. "That was the ancient tradition anyway, though I may be wrong." Was she trying to do damage control? _Luna_? "It could be that they only _claim_ it's now ancient tradition, to appear more harmless on the surface, when in fact the custom is still practiced to this very day." What had he been thinking, of course she wasn't.

"You won't start a bloodbath right now, will you?" a female voice asked cautiously. "Not to step on anyone's toes, but I like this uniform."

And now Padma was being openly vain. Harry tried to exchange a long-suffering look with Dennis but he and Dean refused to look at anything other than their consoles for "some" reason. That left Hermione, and she only had amusement to convey.

Harry slouched farther in his Control Chair. It was going to be a long trip indeed.

Now he knew why Master Yoda had said he'd only join them once the hyperspace part came.

"-. .-"

After they were beyond the edge of the Sol System with no evidence that magic was going to fail any time soon (and the Goblins showing no health issues), Master Yoda finally beamed over to the bridge and Anthony got to do his job of initiating hyperspace travel. Or do his best anyway. Yet again Harry had to mentally assist him remotely by showing tutorial pop-ups and guidelines here and there, especially when it came to double-checking the calculations.

It could have taken as little as a few hours to get to the spot where Harry had set up his mining facilities, construction bay and Trans-Dimensional Stargate (TDS), but he decided to take things slow so that his friends could enjoy the view and use some of the holodisplays to zoom in on some planets. They even took a detour so that Camelot could pass through the system where an amphibious society had managed to evolve to a level of technology just one tier behind spaceflight. Hermione had insisted.

He didn't really need to use the TDS (at 40 feet in diameter it was too small for most ships anyway, let alone a City Ship like Camelot), but he wanted to show everyone what he'd been up to, just in case. The TDS was there if Kingsley had to contact him with his special communication device at any point.

They were all appropriately impressed, especially the goblins, even though they did seem to be wrestling against a mild form of agoraphobia. Goblins always would prefer underground or otherwise enclosed spaces it seemed.

Once they were all ready to go on the next step of their journey, he initiated the jump. Since he didn't intend to ever let anyone have access to the dimensional drive technology, he handled it all by himself as usual. Although with Silima there to handle the underlying processes, everything seemed to go more smoothly than usual.

Camelot disappeared in a flash of blue light that only the stars could see, had they eyes.

Unfortunately, the efficiency of Alteran technology blocked everything but the briefest flash, so those within the ships's dome shield didn't get to see the outside spectacle.

"… That was it?" Dean asked. He was actually disappointed.

Harry managed not to roll his eyes only because Master Yoda was there.

Speaking of whom. "Anxious you should not be to experience excitement." The Jedi master had his eyes closed, as he usually did while trying to feel beyond. "A sign of fortune, turbulence is not."

"So…" Padma said after a while of looking at the darkness of space visible beyond the city's skyline, "Where are we?"

"Deep-space telemetry coming in now," Harry said for their benefit before Anthony had a chance to. "Looks like we're in what seems to be this Dimension's Milky Way Galaxy." Not that the D-Drive could easily end up anywhere else when moving between two dimensions that split off from the same original one at some point in the past. "Just outside the Perseus Arm actually." Now what could that mean? Different stellar drift? Different time point? Both? They'd been on the edge of the Orion Arm before they jumped. "Enabling full power to hyperspace, subspace and EM sensor grid. Let's see how active this version of the Galaxy is, technology-wise."

The first day, Harry plotted a course that would take Camelot on a periodically interrupted hyperspace trip to the point outside the Orion Arm where he'd set up his operations in his home dimension. Or former home dimension, since he didn't plan to go back there any time soon, at least not in any permanent basis. From there, they'd head on towards Earth. The dating systems studying cosmic matter estimated that this dimension had about the same age as the one they'd just left. So there was no time difference to account for the spatial disparity between the departure and arrival points. Maybe randomizing the destination synch point had something to do with it.

Harry had reached the conclusion that he'd gone a bit overboard when he spammed hyperspace-capable satellites in the previous two dimensions. The asteroid operation he'd started in his home galaxy and the materials gathered before he left the Force dimension hadn't restored even half the naquadah, trinum and neutronium stores he'd wasted on what could ultimately have been achieved just fine even by restricting his so-called Spynet to his immediate galactic surroundings, in Alteran terms.

This time, he only prepared normal sublight speed-capable satellites with cloaks, which he released one by one every time Camelot came out of hyperspace in a system judged likely to be hosting intelligent life or relevant resources. All of them cloaked of course.

The one exception was a full-featured satellite, the best he could build, which was more along the lines of an unmanned exploration vehicle. It led the way for Camelot according to the same plotted hyperspace/sublight alternating course, always staying one hyperspace jump ahead of the City Ship. It meant that Harry had to go a lot slower than the city's maximum speed, but it wasn't like he was in any hurry. He wasn't even sure he'd get involved with whatever version of humanity existed here, if any. He'd just decided to go there first before doing anything else, for lack of better ideas.

It took about four days of going in a relatively straight line to finally reach the unofficial galactic sector that contained the Sol System. To his pleasant surprise, his friends spent much of that time fervently brushing up on what they'd need to know to better man their consoles. When they weren't studying or training in hand-to-hand or weapons (not lightsabers though) with Master Yoda, they would plug into virtual realities where various scenarios were simulated. For his part, Harry reviewer ancient wartime reports and went through some simulated courses of his own, having realized that he needed to get a better grip on how to train a crew, never mind lead it on a mission.

He knew real world experience would ultimately be the turning point though.

During the hyperspace trip, Camelot kept getting information from all the satellites he left behind. Harry found plenty of common and not so common resources, but no forms of civilizations at all. That didn't have to mean anything though, he told himself. The path he'd cut across the galactic arm was a tiny speck compared to the vastness of the Milky Way, not to mention the whole universe. Since he didn't have anyone to show off to, and he wasn't in any hurry, he stuck to intra-galactic speeds instead of going with the overkill intergalactic hyperdrive engine.

It was a bit hard to ignore the total lack of interstellar travel though. Even if they didn't travel all that fast in astronomical terms, every hole punched through subspace or hyperspace from real space caused ripples that eventually stretched across many light years. Camelot could detect even the weakest of such eddies, as well as subspace communications, which was why it could deduce if there were advanced enough space-faring civilizations that might have anything to offer him.

By the fourth day, he was sure that the Terra he was headed for would have nothing special in store for him, and he assumed that the rest of the immediate galaxy was in pre-spaceflight stage as well. On the bright side, Camelot had finally started to pick up some very faint and garbled radio transmissions, so it was deduced that this version of Earth would have started their space program, or at least a space radio project of some sort, a few decades back, when the first space-aimed radio dishes were deployed. Meaning that it was probably on the same level as his own Earth, more or less. He'd come to the point where he'd already planned out their stay: they'd take a few days to see how history differed, if at all. See some sights and check if there were any movies, books, comics or musical pieces unique to this version of Earth and go on their way.

Then the avant-garde satellite leading their path lost contact. And a minute later, Camelot received notice that it had been destroyed while passing Saturn.

The alert blared in his mind so suddenly that it made him forget all about the cruiser schematic he was examining. The shock that there even was anything that could detect his technology, never mind destroy it, made him use the necklace he wore to enhance his mind link to the Camelot control center and force an unplanned exit from hyperspace before Silima could compensate for one little oversight on his part.

Had he been sitting in the control chair at the time, he'd have been tied into every system and would not have forgotten to adjust the inertial dampeners in preparation. Unfortunately, he was not in the control chair, so he did not adjust the inertial dampeners in preparation.

Camelot rocked in its entirety as it fell into normal space several parsecs away from the Sol System. Harry managed not to fall off his workshop chair, but what he wouldn't be made aware of until sometime later was that Neville and Dean face-planted rather painfully right where they were sparring hand-to-hand in one of the many training rooms of the Spire of Learning. Forcing past the brief moment of shock, Harry had himself beamed to the central tower immediately, right in the control chair.

The other members of their makeshift council beamed in not long after, but by then he was already half-way done reviewing what had happened. The hologram above him was showing the 360-degree recording and sensor/scan readings of the events leading to the contact cutoff as Harry ordered them replayed. He was distantly aware of Silima explaining the situation to everyone else, but he paid it no heed. He was busy bringing up the recording that the black box of the satellite had just managed to beam via subspace after detaching from the satellite. A moment later, he cursed openly when he received notice that it had self-destructed as well.

Apparently, the satellite had exited hyperspace just outside the orbit of the tenth "planet" that Earth may or may not have discovered by now. Then it had detected the locations of the planets in regards to the sun and each other, information it used to plot a meandering path that would allow it to pass close enough to each of them to conduct scans as per protocol.

Things went fine for "planet" X, Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, but while passing by Saturn the satellite detected an anomaly on Mimas, one of the gas giant's moons that also possessed a mostly spherical shape. The satellite focused its scanners in that direction, reaching the conclusion that the anomaly was located on the far side of that particular moon. Given the orbital positioning at the time, that side happened to be away from the sun. So, in accordance with its programming, the satellite made a detour intending to circle around and take a closer look.

It made it a third of the way before some sort of alien jet came out of nowhere less than three miles behind it. Harry could only assume it had circled around the moon, and maybe rode its gravitational pull, along with that of the planet it was orbiting, to quickly close in on the space probe.

The completely invisible space probe.

More worrying was that it had somehow stayed undetected by every passive sensor he had except the cameras that captured the visible light spectrum. He assumed (okay, hoped) that the fact it had come from behind meant that the jet would have been detected by the active scans. That the jet or whoever was driving it seemed to know how to work around that issue spoke of experience in space warfare though.

The satellite was going to open a hyperspace window to get away, but it didn't have the time. The jet released some type of silver-colored wide-coverage energy blast that… eliminated the cloak and blew all the scans out of whack, even though the shields of the satellite hadn't been disrupted. That meant that, somehow, that wave had done something to the area of space itself, essentially blindfolding the probe on all frequencies, subspace included. It effectively rendered it incapable of plotting a jump to begin with, or getting in contact with Camelot or any other ship with subspace comm support.

Harry watched the recording, dumbfounded, as the jet continued to close in without firing anything else, no doubt seeking to capture the probe. At that point, the satellite ejected the black box in the direction farthest from the bogie and at the same time overloaded its hyperdrive engine to self-destruct and propel it away faster. The recording ended there.

Silence reigned in the Camelot command center.

"… That was one mean jet." Dean eventually said.

Harry closed his eyes. From the looks of it, it was pure luck that the black box made it out of the blind zone before it detonated its integrated explosive charge. Otherwise it wouldn't have been able to send the reconnaissance data at all. The jet had probably attacked as soon as he was within range, and the disruption wave didn't reach very far on his sat's other side.

"Okay," Neville said eventually, when he saw that Harry wasn't going to say anything any time soon. "Everyone, sitrep. What does this recording tell us."

"That… was one mean jet?" Dean tried again.

Neville rolled his eyes. "There is an advanced space-faring society either stationed in or maintaining a presence in the Sol System. This society may or may not be this version's humanity, or whatever other race evolved on Terra. This society also has the ability to affect the fabric of space-time in ways Alterans did not bother pursuing but whose applications in space combat cannot be questioned after what we've just seen."

After a pause, Hermione cautiously added her opinion. "Whoever these people are, they might not be humanity. What we could see of the brief on-screen time of that jet didn't strike me as something humans would design, though I know we can't speak for other dimensions. If this is the case, though, it begs the question of what their relationship with Earth is. They sent no first-contact package for what it's worth, although then again we didn't set anything like that up either."

The unasked question, of course, was whether they were watching over other planets' development, or if that was just the outpost set up by an enemy of Earth.

Assuming they hadn't taken over the planet already. "Master Yoda." Harry spoke up. "Anything you can tell us?"

The short green man shook his head as he kept his eyes closed and his mind reaching out. "Bright, The Force in this dimension is, very bright and calm and warm. Not even a hint of the dark side have I sensed since our arrival." He opened his eyes and frowned. "Meditating I have been, yet not even a hint of another race did I sense." He frowned. "Blind I have become, I fear, since leaving my dimension." He looked up at Harry with a wry expression. "Not as useful will I be to you as I hoped."

"Fatalism aside," Padma intervened before Harry could. "Why _don't_ we have a first-contact protocol?"

Harry slumped in his chair and groaned. "Because I never even considered the possibility of anyone other than the Ori detecting technology with that level of stealth."

"Advanced, this technology is, true. Hard to tell, the difference is, between confidence in it and arrogance."

Harry honestly couldn't tell if Master Yoda was trying to reassure or lecture him with that one.

Then again, since the Ori had probably advanced along the same paths as Alterans, that meant that Harry had just implied that he didn't think anyone else's technology was worth jack.

Maybe he _was_ growing arrogant. Granted, he'd met two so-called ancient precursor races whose technology didn't even begin to compare to his own, but on the other hand he'd only been exploring the multiverse for just a few years. Had he really been getting a big head without realizing it?

Then again, being able to detect a satellite didn't mean that the ones possessing that skill were as advanced in every other aspect that made up a space-faring civilization.

There was one way to start figuring out the answer to that question. "Right. Here's what we'll do."

"-. .-"

Two hours later, Camelot was parked in orbit around the Sun at about the same distance from it as Mercury. It was also right on the opposite side of where Saturn was at the moment, and out of direct line of sight from Earth as well. Not that it mattered, since the City Ship was also completely cloaked and had only short-range passive scanners active.

Since first contact had been all but botched and he wasn't going to send their makeshift package without knowing where Earth stood in regards to whatever that faction was, Harry was going to try a more hands-on type of reconnaissance.

He had released one of the overkill satellites from storage. It was equipped with both sublight engines and (though it would likely be useless for this particular scenario, save for a quick getaway if they were lucky) hyperdrive. The probe also possessed one of the abilities that the Alterans had managed to achieve through technological means just before they ascended: phase shifting. For all intents and purposes, the satellite could become both invisible and intangible while losing none of its ability to gather data. Harry thought of stuffing an energy plasma beam weapon into the mix somehow, but Master Yoda cautioned against it since there was still a chance these weren't the bad guys, though he used other words to relay the message.

Harry would err on the side of caution and not do any hyperspace jumps just in case the race, whoever they were, could detect it. Unfortunately, this meant that it would take several hours just to reach Earth. Caution or no, he wasn't going to spend all his time staring through the eyes of the satellite while it did nothing but travel through dead space.

Eventually, though, the time came for some hands-on action. "Okay," he got comfortable in his control chair as the others stood or sat around him. "Let's do this." The first and most secure subspace transmission Camelot had even initiated locked with the satellite at last. The area above Harry erupted in a full-quality hologram of the sat's travel and readings in real time just as it reached Earth.

Ten minutes later, everyone expressed relief in their own way. Earth was okay. Also, it was the year 2009 here instead of 1999 according to the Internet. "The world wide web seems to have come far in just ten years." Harry mused, then checked the active surface scans seeking certain energy fields. "No evidence of anything magical. No evidence of the Magical World's absence having affected history either." He didn't know how to feel about that. If there had been a positive or negative effect on history, he could have had something to praise or complain about. But these findings basically suggested that his people had ultimately been irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. "Well, best be off I suppose."

After another few hours, the satellite was finally nearing Saturn. Harry took direct control again and guided it along a path completely different from the one that the previous satellite had followed. Not that it did much good. That jet was patrolling the space above where the anomaly was located. Harry drove the cloaked, shielded and phase-shifted satellite within optimum distance. It was hard to find a nice spot without actually activating the sensors for guidance. He was basically flying in blind based on the telemetry recorded by the previous satellite, wanting to see if the subspace transmission between Camelot and the probe could be detected, or if it was just the scans. His visual cameras allowed him to find a spot below the height where the strange alien jet was patrolling. Those were some really random patterns.

Once he was in place, he took a deep breath and used every mind-clearing technique he knew to offset the pressure and anticipation radiating from everyone else. "Well, this is it. The moment of truth." The instant he said that, he activated the scanners on the lowest setting.

Immediately, the patrolling jet diverged from its flight path and started to comb the space around it in a frenzy, throwing scans of its own every which way. Harry dialed the scans to the fullest setting since the cat was out of the bag, aiming to gather as much data as quickly as possible, even though there was no way anything could detect his probe while it was shifted to another dimension.

Data was coming in fast and he wanted to see it immediately, but the jet was about to pass really close from where the satellite was. Harry had the mental command for full self-destruct ready to fire at a moment's notice-

The jet streaked past at impressive speed (comparable to Alteran speed, Harry noted in disbelief) and the scan passed right through the space where the satellite was. The jet didn't stop.

Harry allowed himself to exhale in relief.

Then, a mile away from the satellite the jet suddenly came to a halt and crumbled to pieces. Harry gaped in shock at the unexpected development, then in horrified fascination as the vehicle's parts quickly shifted into a bipedal form that had some kind of rifle aimed right at the spot where the satellite was.

The white laser shot came faster than Harry could think past the sheer surprise of seeing a shapeshifting robot. It struck his space probe dead-center and took out the forcefield, even though it was as out of phase as everything else.

Harry sent the subspace self-destruct command just before a second beam of light passed through the space where the intangible satellite was.

Nothing could be heard despite there being eleven people present.

Harry didn't bother trying to reassure himself with platitudes. To tell himself that the power source of exploration satellites wasn't even close to a ZPM and he shouldn't have expected it to hold out against direct assault by an attacker that was even half-way competent. Especially since it was a very small model meant for stealth. The simple fact was that the best Alteran stealth had been foiled. _Intangibility_ had been somehow foiled by whatever those things were.

Shapeshifting robots. What the hell kind of reality had he ended up in? And what was the relation between those things and Earth?

Gritting his teeth, he called up the information that his scanners had been able to record and send out before the uplink's termination. Under his ministrations, the sensor readings and visual recordings consolidated into two images displayed side by side.

On the left was the sight of some sort of spaceship, shaped like a gigantic shark with auxiliary decks and cannons sticking out like talons. It seemed to have crash-landed and Harry could only hope it wasn't space-worthy given its size. It measured (Harry's mouth fell slightly ajar at the number) 4,000 meters long, 2,800 meters wide and 2,000 meters tall. Unable to believe his eyes, Harry displayed next to those figures the basic specs of an Aurora-class battleship, the largest space vessel ever made by Alterans. It topped at 3,500 by 1,000 by 300 meters.

That alone would have been enough to make Harry wary, but there was the other half of the hologram to consider too. On the right was a close-up of the alien robot. A large thing of just under 40 feet in height, holding some sort of sniper rifle and staring forward with two, menacing red eyes.

This… this was a problem.


	2. Chapter 2: Reasonable Conclusions

**A/N: **First off, thanks for the reviews. Even the flamers, as their comments gave me a good laugh.

To my unsigned reader who seemed to think I didn't update "jack shit" since I posted chapter 1 of this story: I actually did update my transformers fanfiction. I say this because, as will become clear during this chapter, it is that very story that this one crosses over with, not the base TF Movie universe which has too many plot holes and flat characters for me to honor with any crossover.

Worry not, since it's not necessary to read that, but if you don't want to wait for TF: Prime Divide universe lore to be explored in later chapters of this, a lot of the tech/supernatural/spiritual elements have been thoroughly explored there.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 2: Perfectly Reasonable Conclusions<strong>

"-. .-"

Blindness. The complete lack of form and visual light perception. Not an easy way to live, suffering from it. Yoda never truly felt afflicted with it, despite how strong the Dark Side of the Force had been up until his departure from his dimension. Clouded his vision had been by it for the longest time, true, but the Dark Side itself had definitely not been undetected. Like a blindfold blocking his sight, he would always know when it was there.

That had changed since reaching the latest universe on their multi-dimensional travels. Bright everything was whenever Yoda closed his eyes. Too bright, he could say. Different, the cosmos. Calm and content, until he cast his mind in it. Then… the Jedi master felt as if under a microscope. His meditation had been cut short because of it, the first few times. But he persevered, despite how frustrating and futile his efforts always proved to be.

No matter how far and how long he "looked" from the Spire's meditation chambers, he could find no trace of the Dark Side. While he was "looking" towards the part of the solar system where the black ship was, other than the skin-crawling feeling of being watched (by something that had nothing to do with the alien ship itself) he felt nothing. Looking upon the Earth, other than the strangeness of this universe's Force he still felt nothing. There were the normal emotions of people, but no dark _tendency_ for the Force itself. And yet his first hopeful thought – that there was only light in The Force here – could not be true, for there was always a light and a dark side of the Force.

That could only mean that the Dark Side could somehow stay completely undetectable in this dimension.

"Or that there is no Dark Side of the Force because there is no such thing as The Force."

Master Yoda's eyes snapped open at the unfamiliar voice, but that was as far as his reaction went. Simply because his mind stumbled at the sight around him. Or complete lack of sight. Pitch black everything was. Everything except himself and the person a few meters in front of him. A man it was, or an apparition that had taken the guise of one. With black hair and eyes, and proper human proportions for the limbs and body. Normal, the sight might have been, the black void of their meeting place notwithstanding.

If not for the agelessness of his face and the scintillating mass of white light that made up his indistinguishable vestment.

With caution honed over several lifetimes' worth of years, Yoda pushed himself to his feet. Curious the feel of a floor beneath him was, given that this place was just a mental construct.

"Actually it isn't," the man told him.

Brown eyes narrowed in caution as a green-skinned head tilted in suspicion. Read his thoughts could he?

"I don't need to," the unknown apparition followed, but didn't explain any further.

There were several options here, but Yoda decided on the most straightforward. "… Who are you, might I ask?"

The floating man had a deep, rich voice that was filled with mirth. "Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a messenger." He smiled. It was a lopsided, oddly friendly sight. "At least that's what my twice-great-grandson would say. He always did like V's alliterations."

Yoda blinked and reevaluated his situation and the person before him. During the months spent in his latest student's original Earth, he had been exposed to the entertainment industry and fictional works of that planet on various occasions. The graphic novel focused on a certain dystopian version of Great Britain had been one of the better examples of human imagination, if somewhat disconcerting. Try as he might, however, he could not figure out why the one in front of him would allude to it.

It was at odds with everything he knew about ascended beings. The one in front of him could be nothing else.

"Because your student's databases include every_ possible _thing about ascension and the ones undertaking it," the man chided, sounding less amused than before. "There are assumptions that should never be made by anyone about certain things. Ascension is one of those things. But you _know_ this." Black eyes sharpened as the unknown vision crossed his arms. "After all, it is part of why you offered to accompany him on his journey, isn't it? Although we both know that the main reason for joining him is a lot less encouraging."

It wasn't a question.

Yoda's eyes narrowed as he thought about his situation, but he needed more information. "Brought me here you have. Wherever here is. Why?"

"No one brought you here," the man seemed serene. Yoda couldn't sense anything through the Force from him. "You managed to tune in yourself. Despite the handicap that those from your dimension have to cope with."

Yoda's thoughts came to a halt before they could roam the many implications of the second part of that statement. All of a sudden, he had a feeling that he was in for some nasty shocks.

Assumption that was confirmed almost immediately, when the man uncrossed his arms and extended one straight at him. "There are many assumptions we need to get rid of. That the shocks will be 'nasty' is just one of many." His tone was serious and his hand was set as though preparing to turn a latch. "But first, let's cure your blindness."

There wasn't even the barest a moment's delay before the surrounding blackness shattered into a billion pieces.

"-. .-"

There really was no magical world on this version of Earth. Not that Harry had expected anything else, after getting essentially no readings of any magical creatures or wards on the planet. But he'd gone looking anyway, using the Marauder in orbit to beam himself all over Britain, from King's Cross to the Leaky Cauldron to even Hogsmeade and Hogwarts. He didn't find even a trace, not even ruins. Or even historical accounts that carried hints of their involvement. Kind of disquieting really, to know that the Wizards of his world had been so good at hiding or obliviating the knowledge of themselves to the point where their existence had no bearing in the grand scheme of things. It was strange, to see that success on their part from the other side of the fence. If it even qualified as success.

All the while he made sure not to be caught on video of course. The blunders he'd committed during his first interdimensional trip never really lost their clarity, since his memory was perfect so time couldn't gnaw at the recollection. That, and he didn't want to take any risks now that he knew there was something in this universe that could give Alteran technology pause, however small. It was why he'd not activated any active scans on the new satellites he deployed, and why he didn't use hyperspace jumps to reach the planet quickly. Instead, he brought the Marauder to Earth under cloak, at the highest sublight speed he could manage without relativistic problems cropping up.

He also wanted to do something with his time, while the Marauder's computer searched the Internet and compiled all the information that had anything to do with giant robots and a host of different other things that could be relevant to the situation, according to some parameters he set. Since it was seeking the information through the world's info network, it was limited to its speed, especially since many data centers and supercomputers lacked outgoing wireless links of any kind, so he didn't have as many wireless waves to leverage as he would have liked.

He missed master Yoda's dimension already, with their so very superior intergalactic network.

Oh well.

After analyzing the behavior and information provided by the short-lived satellite he deployed to Saturn's moon the previous day, he concluded that the cloak did work, but that active scans could be detected if not intercepted. That meant it was safe enough to take passive visual, IR and other readings (he didn't hold much hope for anything outside the visible spectrum, but it was the principle of the thing). He also noted that the subspace transmissions themselves hadn't been detected.

Harry still decided to keep them at a minimum, at least until he found whatever organization or governments on Earth knew about the creatures, if any. After seeing a space jet / robot detecting his scans, he wasn't going to bet that subspace communications were outside their ability to monitor. It COULD be that it wasn't just the active scans that were picked up by the space jet robot, but also the increased data streams that resulted from the spike in information being relayed.

Camelot's sensors were up and running of course, monitoring everything moving in normal space and hyperspace alike, the latter reaching throughout the Orion arm and large swaths of the ones adjacent to it. Strangely, nothing was moving in hyperspace, and no subspace transmissions were taking place either. No other evidence of spacefaring civilizations showed up. As if this version of the Milky Way had none of that. The aliens / robots here in the system must have come from the other side of the galaxy or a different one entirely. And they either weren't communicating at all for some reason, or they did it through means that had no subspace or electromagnetic basis. The former could mean the ones here were a splinter faction or some extragalactic group lost to the stars. The other didn't bear thinking about.

Quantum entanglement communicators could perhaps work, but any communication link of that type disconnected when one of the transmitters entered hyperspace or was otherwise subjected to space-time distortions. It was why the Alterans had abandoned it in favor of subspace transmissions and, later, the long-distance mental communication device.

Now that was a worrying thought: that whatever those things were had something like that available to them.

Harry shook his head as he walked down the street. All this thinking was making it impossible to enjoy the view and the sounds. So much for taking some time to relax.

Another element in the readings he gathered (before the life of the satellite was cut short) caused a fair bit of incredulity as well. It was something he never considered to be possible: the structure of the ship and the robot that took out his satellite both existed on multiple phases at the same time. _All_ phases that Alteran technology was aware of actually. It was baffling. Also, it was an absurd advantage. It made phase-shifting completely useless against whatever those things were. The only reason the cloak hid his satellite at all was because it _wasn't_ based on phase shifting technology. It was also why the shot managed to affect the satellite in the first place.

It was an odd thing, that effect. The shot was some sort of anti-matter charge, mixed with an energy he'd never come into contact with or found in the Alteran database. Like the weapon that fired it, it existed on all phases. That meant the shot was only stopped on the primary phase, but not the others. That alone would have been fine (without the existence on the primary phase, the shot itself could have been intangible for all that the satellite was concerned), but the impact caused some bizarre cascade reaction to force all the energy on the upper phases into the primary one, multiplying the power of the attack by several factors. Enough to take out the shield immediately.

It didn't help that the guided energy weapon was of the type that maintained its potency in space, rather than losing it with distance as most energy guns tended to. It indicated a significant level of advancement (in that field at least) because it always took a while for a civilization to overcome the degenerative effect that cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space had on such things. Although most solutions led to the usefulness of plasma beam weapons taking a huge hit inside a planet's atmosphere, especially if there was a lot of oxygen and nitrogen around.

Harry was really curious if that problem, at least, still plagued those robots and whoever made them.

There was a silver lining at least. Since there weren't any "free" phases for them to move between, they couldn't possibly use phase shifting for themselves either. Well, unless they wanted to blow themselves up, like that disaster of all sniper shots had upon impact.

Harry didn't even want to imagine having to fight one of those things if it could turn intangible or invisible at will. Or both. He'd win, sure, but not without a lot of property damage or possible bystanders getting injured. Not to mention the frustration.

On the other hand, he did relish the thought of going head to head in a jet fighter or in the Marauder against that blasted jet robot creep.

Not that he was planning on it. As a matter of fact, he had a battle satellite standing by in Camelot's main cargo bay, waiting for deployment. There was no way that jet could put a scratch on it, despite that rifle apparently firing some sort of null charges capable of taking out any system. The shield of the satellite was the best there was, not counting the domes of Atlantis-Class City Ships and the shields of Aurora-class vessels.

On the flip side, there was that voice at the back of his mind that said the alien jet probably had enough speed and agility to avoid the plasma weapons that satellite used. It may be that drone weapons were the only things that could surpass that versatility. The satellite would probably handle anything else they had though, as long as it wasn't as fast as that annoying creep.

He had programmed his constructors to make a couple more of those offensive satellites too, equipped with faster laser weapons and missiles. The former had the speed, the latter had intelligent guidance.

Still, better to err on the side of caution until he could reassess the situation. He'd flaunted his technology from the get go when he appeared above Babylon 5 and it ruined half the city's systems. Not to mention that he relied on it so much that a great plan backfired so badly that thousands of people died in the fallout. And a lot of master Yoda's teachings had been about being calm and thorough before he acted, assuming time allowed, lest he did something he'd regret later.

It wouldn't be too much longer anyway. He'd know what step to take next in about two hours if things went well and his fresh (exploration, not military) satellites made it to Saturn on time, which they would.

Harry had deployed three satellites to Saturn: one to orbit the moon Mimas, where the black ship was, one that would travel between the other major moons, and one for the planet itself. He would never remotely access more than one at a time, just to be sure they wouldn't be found, but he wanted to know if there were other ships hidden around the planet, and without the range of active scans he needed to get in close. The one around Mimas would constantly move in order to avoid the patrols of the jet, if it was still there. He'd also sent some to the other planets in the system, but only one for each. They would automatically gather information but only send it when remotely accessed by him, or when they detected danger despite the cautionary measures.

Maybe it was paranoid, but better safe than sorry. It wasn't just him in a big empty city anymore.

That made Harry smile wryly. The others had _not_ been pleased when he refused to take anyone along with him on the scouting trip. And telling them that Silima would maintain a live extension in the Marauder's computer didn't set them at ease either. And he didn't even mention that the AI's link strength would be as low-key as possible. Again, to avoid being detected until he was sure whether or not those machines or whoever made them could detect the transmissions. Whether planet-side or somewhere in orbit, Harry was certain the alien race had sent some of those robotic probes or scouts to Earth.

Come to think of it, the only person who didn't have anything to say about his trip was Master Yoda. But then he'd told them earlier that he'd try to meditate on the situation and try to find out why the Force was so abnormal and how the Dark Side could hide so well here. Harry honestly wished him luck. Anything that could worry Master Yoda and stump him to such a degree was worrisome, to say the absolute least.

Having finally given up on his search for Magical Britain, Harry Potter decided he'd had enough of Britain as a whole and had the Marauder beam him across the Atlantic and well into North American territory.

An hour later, he entered a cafe feeling rather ambivalent. The break he took had been wonderful, or would have been if not for him being alone. Maybe he should have let one of the others come with him after all. Then this visit to the Niagara Falls would have been marvelous instead of simply pleasant. The sound of the massive waterfall and the sight of the everlasting rainbow above it would have made the risk, minimal as it was, worth it.

Putting the issue out of his mind, he looked for a seat. He didn't find one near the window, but the distant thrum of the great falls was an ever present murmur even with the closed door keeping the world out. Ordering some hot chocolate and some snack or other, he pulled a laptop out of his bag, set it on the tabletop and opened it.

He didn't really need it, since he would be mentally analyzing the information, but the computer (earlier beamed into being based on a decent but not too ostentatious model found online) would be a nice deterrent against attention. The point was to make him seem no different from any other tourist while he telepathically probed surrounding people. It was a minor trick really, sending a word or image into their surface thoughts and letting the people's own minds conjure up related images, even prompt them to start conversations between themselves.

He discreetly sent words and images (robot, aliens, space ship and transforming robot were the main terms) while he checked search results on his laptop. Or pretended to, since he was mentally interfacing with Silima's extension instead, and through it the surveillance satellite deployed in orbit. The sweep of the Internet had yielded many results, most of them easy enough to dismiss as unfounded conspiracy theorist gathering grounds. That itself wasn't surprising, since any intelligent organization worth its salt knew better than to have their mainframes connected to the rest of the Internet, or possess any sort of wireless capabilities. So he wasn't surprised that the Intelligence agencies he hacked (all of them really) didn't have any information he was looking for. A lot of other incriminating, highly morally questionable data did make it into his so-called hands, but nothing about giant robots.

Two websites caught his attention however. One was The Real Effing Deal and was apparently being run by some kid that had just started college: a Leo Spitz. It had some videos about "giant robots the government doesn't want you to know about." That implied that the things weren't human made. The bigger point of interest was the second website though. Giant Effing Robots. Harry would have snorted at the result of the trace on it (the owner lived with his mother and manned a deli by day) if the website wasn't so much better encrypted than the other one in comparison. By the pitiable standards of Earth anyway.

Information compiled there from old newspaper sources and online conspiracy sites raised a red flag around Mission City. Some terrorist attack involving experimental robots happened on the same day that Hoover Dam was completely obliterated over the course of less than an hour.

…

Wait, what?

Blinking, Harry mentally ran through the information again. How on earth did that even happen? Unless someone blew the dam apart deliberately, but with Earth's current technological level it could only have happened if the dam had been stuffed full of explosives well in advance. More importantly, how did the cover-up for that entire mess even work?

More telling was that the videos and written information on that website called the things giant _alien_ robots. That confirmed the theory about them being constructs belonging to some other civilization not native to the Sol System. How would someone who sold meat for a living possibly know all that though? Or have access to videos of those machines, however choppy?

Theories about secret agents were already swimming and taking form in Harry's mind when an alert sounded at the back of his head. Not showing any outward signs, he opened a viewscreen in his mind's eye. It was a live transmission from the Marauder, of several meteors that had come out of nowhere and entered the atmosphere in a cluster, almost on the other side of the planet from where the ship itself was located. They were pretty large, but were already breaking apart in fiery pieces on reentry. Still, he narrowed his eyes at the sight – they looked pretty sturdy and metallic – and considered starting his active sensors to scan them better when his attention was diverted again.

A collective hush fell over the establishment. Harry blinked and brought his focus back to his immediate surroundings and traced the source of the sudden disquiet. His eyes alighted on the flickering TV mounted above the bar the same moment a deep, grating voice started to speak from the mouth of the metal devil displayed on it.

"Citizens of the human hive, your leaders have withheld the truth. You are not alone in the universe. We have lived among you, hidden, but no more. As you've seen, we destroy your cities at will," images of some of the world's sprawling metropolises flashed in quick succession, along with shots of Paris being attacked by more of those things (the meteors he'd let past were really _two-legged machines_), as well as missiles of considerable explosive capacity. "Unless you turn over this boy."

Harry had already begun to trace the transmission and tuned out everyone else.

Great. So either he was dealing with delusional AIs on some weird manhunt for a dorky-looking kid, or this was just a ruse by some secretive race deliberately making humanity think the robots were the actual aliens.

How marvelous.

"-. .-"

It took five minutes for Harry to find the transmission's source. Or, well, one of the sources. One of the many, _many_ sources. One of the many out of a myriad.

His thoughts raced as he applied a notice-me-not to himself and slipped out of the café, feeling ambivalent to hear everyone else dismissing the whole event as some hoax. _:Silima, guide me to a secluded spot.:_

_:Uploading guide line to virtual HUD.:_ A line made of blue light appeared before him, along with a minimap at the corner of his vision. Who needed augmented reality eyewear when you had technopathy?

Truth was that Silima had worked through Harry's ever present necklace to find the source before the ugly face even disappeared from the TV screen. And bystanders' phones. And laptops. And tablets. And whatever else.

However, for the sake of thoroughness Silima had also done a sweep of the planet's satellite network through the Marauder's computers and found that it wasn't just one source, but many. The hack seemed to originate from every single television channel, telephone and Internet relay on the planet, as well as every public server and database there was, with very few exceptions. The five minutes were spent trying to separate the fake signals from the real, only to reach the conclusion they were all real points of origin. That answered the question of how the message could be transmitted through every electronic device people owned. Except his own laptop, which actually lacked connectivity hardware (he'd been mentally dictating what the screen would show).

None of his findings painted a very promising picture. There was no way the aliens could overtake the entire communication networks – _all_ networks – of the planet through a single access point. Phone lines, TV broadcast carriers and Internet providers just weren't interconnected the way required for it. To do it would mean having some agent or other at every physical origin point, or having prior control of said points. But that only opened another can of worms and questions, like why they only now overtook the communications if they'd been "living among you" as the creep had said. Or why they released their hold on the electronics of the world at all, after only a brief spiel.

Unless they hadn't? Harry frowned as he finally found a relatively secluded spot and beamed straight to the Marauder's control chair.

There obviously wasn't any sort of invasion force blockading the planet. However, he couldn't account for anything on the surface, having kept from making the more blatant of his active scans. Now, though, he wondered if maybe he should have just started them from the beginning, stealth or no stealth. If he had, he'd have known about those meteors not being real meteors immediately.

Not that he'd have had much time to react to the information. Those things had apparently approached the planet at FTL speeds despite being little better than comets. They'd only slowed down to reasonable speed just outside the Earth's low orbit, at which point they proceeded to crashland and… attack Paris apparently. And a splinter group had assaulted a US Navy fleet as well, bringing down a whole naval carrier if the sight in the Atlantic Ocean was anything to go by. At least rescue crews had already been mobilized.

Closing his eyes, Harry pushed the sensors to full power and began to scan both the planet's surface and the three main orbital blankets of terran satellites. That jet of before had proven capable of staying undetected until it entered combat mode (possibly by diverting all energy emissions into a higher phase?), but maybe not all of them had scrambling systems. Even if he ultimately decided not to get involved (unlikely as it was) he still wanted to capture one of the things and take it apart. He'd prepared a restraining field platform for the precise purpose of capturing one of those robots for study. The value of multi-phase physical manifestation would have been enough incentive even without other technologies built into them. Sure, he'd had to magically expand the Marauder's cargo hold to make vertical room for the thing, but it hadn't been that much of a hassle. He was probably going to make it standard practice anyway, that type of magical modification.

Moments after he engaged the sensor suite, the surge of the beaming system sounded again, and the light deposited Harry on the main catwalk of a TV relay not too far from the Algonquin Provincial Park. The light hadn't even completely disappeared when he cut the air with a two-fingered swipe. The severing charm cut neatly through metal. Three more sketched a full square. A final, telekinetic tug pulled the main relay node out, right into the path of a handheld scanner. One second to do a thorough scan and cast a stasis charm, one more for Silima to use the Marauder's transporter system to materialize a replacement in the air right next to the first. A third second for him to install the replacement with a mentally tweaked Reparo.

The transporter's beam took him and the original equipment away just as the cuts in the metal faded as if they'd never been. As he expected, the stasis charm on the relay node didn't survive the beaming (he was finding out new things every day) so he cast it again while the Marauder's microlab came online. It would only take a moment, but he wasn't taking any chances. Just before he'd beamed to Earth SIlima had noticed that all the origin points of the alien ultimatum were disappearing en masse, somehow. In a way that software alone didn't account for.

Bad enough already that the standard terran binary code of the transmission seemed to be interposed with symbols he'd never seen before. Controlled environment was the name of the game here.

The electro-gravitic pedestal grew out of the floor so he set the crude machinery on it, at which point the forcefield engaged, sealing it inside an anti-gravity bubble. Most of the scanner waves and beams were invisible to normal eyesight, but not all. The ones that did cross into the visible spectrum were bright indeed. It made the space inside the field shine white for the one second it took to study the relay node all the way to nanoscopic level and beyond.

Harry turned away, looking instead at a newly emerged holoscreen. The findings were… strange. But they confirmed his suspicion: it really was quantum entanglement. A quantum entanglement communication device build out of interlocking nanobots shaped a lot like spiders. The device was rapidly deteriorating because the nanobots themselves were breaking apart with alarming speed. Not because of some self-destruct measure or other but because they were just that poorly made.

But then that was the whole point wasn't it? The more he examined the results of the scans, the more deductions his mind performed and it made him feel a strange mix of disbelief and grudging respect. The nanobots were a disgraceful example of nanotechnology, but only when compared to a proper application of the concept. When you took into account that they were made from the same, third-rate materials and alloys Earth used for (in this case at least) TV relays, they became utter masterpieces of engineering. It took a special brand of genius and precision to make working nanites from silicon and – Harry squinted – self-replicating non-biological DNA? Well, _that_ was definitely a different tech evolution path.

Looking at the software side, Harry could only understand it because the code was mostly in binary, despite the appearance of those unknown glyphs that accompanied miniscule particles of that energy no Alteran had ever seen before. Clearly the nanites had been dumbed down in order to ensure compatibility with a more primitive tech level, especially in terms of materials. He sent a command to syphon the exotic energy from the dying nanites for later study while he inspected the programming. There were only two protocols. One governed self-replication: the nanites would constantly make more of themselves from surrounding material while reintegrating into the human-made system, waiting for a remote command that would engage the second protocol.

Said second protocol was to swarm together and form a quantum communication receiver that would take over the relay and transmit whatever the master code ordered. The energy needed to make that happen was the simple electricity in the human-build network. It was also enough to fry the nanites in moments but the code accounted for that and kept replacing the ones that fell apart. Incidentally, this was why the image kept flickering. Harry James Potter had never seen swarm tactics applied to something like this, but it made him think of the Wraith, which didn't do anything good for his mood.

How long ago had this unknown alien race planted the initial nanite colonies? It must have been years, decades even, otherwise there wouldn't have been enough of them to take over the entire world's networks in the manner he'd just been witness to. Unless the machines "living among them" had hunted down all relays, but if they had enough units for that they'd have invaded long ago. So that couldn't be the case.

The replication rate seemed to be quite low too, but even then it was sufficient for a nanite colony planted in the USA to spread throughout the nation via regular communication and even power lines. More alarming, an infection to an internet relay in, say, Washington could reach France and everywhere else across the Atlantic through the internet lines in the oceans. _Had_ done it most likely, over the past years. Maybe since right after the Mission City and Hoover Dam fiasco happened. Even a brief USB or power connection could transfer a few nanites to some civilian's portable computer and the infection could be spread with none the wiser.

Yes, it had taken a long time. But the method was also undetectable to human security sweeps, and to any advanced society not quite at nanite research level yet. The poor quality of the nanobots seemed counterproductive – the transmission about that Sam Witwicky person had probably fried 95% of them all – but 5% was more than enough, hell one nanobot was enough, for the infection to spread again, waiting for some time in the future when an invasion might or might not take place. One button and every single wide-reaching communication system would be taken out, or disrupted for just as long as it was needed to establish a beachhead.

And unless you could build nanobots specifically designed to replicate and hunt down the infesting ones, there was no way to truly eradicate them even if you did know they were there. Unless you had something like beaming technology, which was more advanced than that by miles anyway.

Bloody hell.

He immediately ordered Silima to begin production of a nanite strain that would achieve exactly that.

_:Already underway, young master.:_ Her serious voice sounded in his mind. _:Shall I have one produced in the Maraduer's lab once the baseline is complete?:_

_:Yes. But make adjusting for non-ideal materials a priority, even if it takes longer.:_ With no trinium, naquadah and most importantly neutronium available on Earth, allowances had to be made. He did have the materials, and could have just programmed his normal nanites to do the task. But after seeing the foreign malicious strain, doing something better or at least similar under the same constraints was a matter of pride.

Going back to the intelligence reports, Harry grimly beheld the conclusions of his analysis (which had taken just a few minutes but seemed to have lasted much, much longer), then a small, almost invisible grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. Maybe not the most natural reaction to the current situation, but still. An advanced civilization that had pursued an evolutionary path radically different to the Alterans' own. This was what he'd started dimension-hopping for. This was what he'd been seeking!

He was going to beam one of those robots straight to the pre-arranged containment unit the first chance he got.

One last look at the state of the relay node revealed that the QEC device had broken down beyond use. Just as well. QEC transmissions may not be traceable, but there was no way to be sure that the creators didn't have some way to home in on the device itself, or the strange energy particles running through it. Leaving the lab to the task of syphoning off that unusual energy and recording the glyphs for later perusal, Harry walked out. He could have beamed to the control chair again, but the minute it would take him to walk to the cockpit would allow him to check the information gathered about that Samuel Witwicky person that the aliens were sending robots after.

The beginnings of the file Silima had compiled painted the guy as pretty normal. But ten seconds in, Harry did a double take. A small one, but he still did it. And it wasn't just because of the more recent pictures of the guy. True, they made him look a lot better than the one on the driver's license that the robot transmission had shoved in everyone's face. But it was the type of pictures they were that raised eyebrows: they were all small. There were plenty surveillance recordings of him reading hours away in various libraries and bookstores across the USA, or eating in a restaurant or other (he'd taken intestate summer road trips the previous two years apparently), but photos were another matter entirely. Other than a couple of old pictures from cached archives, there were no photos of him online besides the type found on IDs and diplomas.

And there were a _lot _of diplomas. Kept on the down low, but not exactly hidden from the public. All legitimate.

The wizard's eyebrows twitched, then steadily kept rising and rising the more he read. No major degrees yet – thank God for that, since the guy was just a few months older than he was – but there were at least two dozen areas that the guy had minored in. Mechanics, electrical engineering, biology, biochemistry, astronomy, physics, astrophysics, computer programming, the list went on and on and on. What the hell was this guy? Had Hermione been born male in this dimension or something? He did have brown eyes, though the hair was cut short and didn't have any curls he could see.

There was even a professional certificate for Ping-Pong floating in the midst of everything, of all things.

As if those "secret" titles weren't enough, he'd just started his first term at Princeton, more specifically the Master of Public Affairs offered through the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Though it only made Harry wonder why the guy would bother with the ruse of attending college at all. While it should have been impossible for so many titles to be accumulated so fast, there was a clear and very real presidential order in place that decreed he was allowed to take ANY exam whenever he wanted. It even had its own web page on the US Government's website. True, there were no links leading to it anywhere, but that didn't matter, since the people in the know would only have to type it in the address box of a web browser in order to confirm Sam's permission to completely disregard proper educational procedures whenever he felt like it.

The entire picture was more than a little fishy, and the last annotations on the file Silima had compiled gave birth to Harry's suspicion that Sam Witwicky was probably a member of the alien race who'd defected. All evidence suggested that the son of Ron and Judy had been totally normal, even somewhat of a wimp and a loser, until the second year of High School. But then he'd somehow been at ground zero during the Mission City disaster and become a super-polymath immediately after, one that apparently had government backing.

It was almost painfully obvious that the original Sam had died and been replaced, hopefully with the parents' consent. Unless Sam had always been the alien but the "terrorist attack" exposed him to the relevant authorities who'd miraculously _not_ taken him to a lab for dissection.

If the guy hadn't been leading a relatively innocent life for the past few years, Harry would have been worried that he'd been taking over the Government or something. As it was, his initial theory seemed to be the most likely scenario. The question now was whether the alien race were as humanoid as Sam appeared, or if they had some shapeshifting ability. That, or maybe some holographic technology that allowed him to disguise himself.

Both were equally probable, given that the Dr. R. Hatchett listed as his personal physician didn't seem to exist outside the medical file submitted to Woodrow Wilson School as part of the admission folder. Silima had dug deep, but she didn't find what the "R." stood for anywhere. She had, however, discovered that Samuel Witwicky was sharing a dorm room with none other than Leo Spitz of all people.

Now what were the odds of that being a coincidence?

By the time he reached the one-man bridge, Harry had switched to the file of Mikaela Banes, Sam's (apparently) perfectly real human girlfriend.

That was when the wizard came to a complete halt in the door and felt his left eye twitch.

If this was a case of an alien infiltrator being sent to sabotage a planet only to go native after falling in love with a smoking hot and hypercompetent human woman, Harry was taking his friends and spaceships and leaving.

Fortunately, he was immediately given a good reason to abandon that train of thought: the Marauder had finished the sensor sweep.

_:I have identified the two biggest points of interest.:_ Silima's voice sounded in his mind. _:I would suggest examining the one in orbit first.:_

It was a telecommunications satellite that came up as totally ordinary on all sensors, except the visual ones that noticed a strange attachment at the end facing away from the planet. Now sat in the control chair, Harry brought the image up on the Marauder's front view window and zoomed in. The sat in question was literally on the horizon, nearly beyond the Earth's curvature, even at that height, but the zoom function still closed in up to a dozen feet or so, to give a complete view of the target.

Well what do you know? The attachment looked a lot like the alien nanobots, only much larger in scale. It was entwined with the satellite by means of dozens of thin tentacles.

Harry would have beamed the entire thing to the cargo hold right then, if not for the girth. It was too wide to fit, and he did want an intact specimen. And while it looked like a satellite, he didn't rule out the possibility of it being capable of transforming into something or other. If only he'd made a wider holding platform.

Fortunately, the second point of interest gave him a better option, even if it did cause a feeling of urgency to erupt inside him for a moment. The Marauder locked on a point a couple dozen miles from Princeton. A full zoom revealed none other than Sam Witwicky and his girlfriend, huddled together with their backs at the wall of a dilapidated building on the edge of a scrap yard. A large, black and yellow robot stood sentry nearby, but was still dwarfed by the junk piles all around. Some distance away, two smaller robots seemed to be hovering over – what was this, an all-star reunion? – Leo Spitz.

Damn. How the hell had the guy managed to get himself captured already? Unless the robots were _his_ creations. Guards maybe? If he was an alien that went turncoat, it made sense he'd do what his kind were best at, which was robotics apparently. The things did seem to be made from car parts, something that supported his assumption. As did the manhunt that had just been launched by the world's governments.

Harry looked at the sight grimly for a moment, but he couldn't help the feeling of opportunity that flashed over his face. He couldn't help it in the face of the realization that the yellow sentry bot was a perfect fit for the forcefield restraining platform he'd put together.

Then again, if they were made from car parts, they were probably very poor facsimiles of the genuine article.

Oh well.

Decision made, Harry Potter locked the transporter on the three humans and the yellow robot and beamed himself to the cargo hold, where he telekinetically tapped the controls that would deploy the platform. He wasn't going to take risks, even if the things turned out to be Witwicky's. The yellow construct would be going in the holding field.

Once everything was in place, he mentally ordered the four targets beamed over. He felt somewhat guilty at the fleeting thought of how convenient the manhunt was, but no one could deny that offering people shelter and protection was a great way to establish trust.

Later, he would curse himself for not contacting them beforehand.

When three startled and confused humans materialized facing away from him, Harry Potter barely had time to be surprised by the failure message returned from the single robotic target. Three standing humans became two, because Sam Witwicky fell to all fours the moment he appeared, and Harry could only look on in shock as he grabbed his head with one hand and, after haltingly trying to utter something or other, released the most wretched, horrible scream of agony he'd ever heard.

The thick, space-warping dome of electric light that literally exploded from him when the scream reached its peak barely gave Harry enough time to raise a shield.

"-. .-"

The world tilted dangerously. Tilted and refused to snap back into place. Instead, there was a flash of blinding white and the sensation of spark-crushing agony as his whole frame seemed to try and rend itself apart all at once. For one endless moment he could think of nothing except how different the blinding light was compared to what that color normally meant – strength and calm and _home_ – then his spark gave a mighty pulse, and time rushed back into its proper rhythm, pulling with it a deluge of processor-rattling sensor feedback.

Proximity sensors came back online first , followed the suite of gravimeters. They told him he was lying on his side on battered concrete. Touch sensors confirmed it a nanosecond later, then the growing data streams were finally joined by hearing, smell and the electromagnetic sensor suite. Optics came online last, and after flickering static the visibility resolved itself and showed nothing but the corner of a dilapidated warehouse, the base of a scrap pile, and the Bag of Tricks.

Bumblebee's entire existence zeroed in on the sight of the seemingly innocent-looking yellow backpack.

He was on his knees instantly, scanners sweeping the space in front of him with the urgency of a desperate person whose last reason to live had just been taken away. A beam so wide and bright sketched the surrounding area that it may as well have been a pane of glass. The suddenness of his movement almost sent him falling over, but he was saved from another crash by something – which he'd later learn was Skids – but he couldn't be bothered to even look around for what it was in that moment. Not with his internal chronometer scrambled – hat had _never_ happened – and not when Mikeala and Sam were _gone_.

His vocalizer sputtered uselessly when he tried to shout, even though it had been fixed months prior. Someone or something was trying to get his attention by yelling, but he barely heard them and it was all he could do to stay coherent in the face of the tremors running through him, and the disjoined data scrolling every which way through his glitching HUD. Energy surges were still frying his inner systems – _all internal energy can be controlled through willed moderation_, he tried to remember, _that is the basis of Circuit-Su._ He tried to consciously control the power rushing through his circuits, but for every success he suffered a setback when energon only partially transmuted from inert to volatile form burst out of weakened lines or throbbed painfully inside his pumps.

_Metallikato is a physical discipline that can control the Protos _– _the primordial material that all Cybertronians are made of_ –_ regardless of the frame's integrity, or lack thereof_, Sam's voice sounded in his mind again. Sam's, because Optimus never could get his helm out of his aft and acknowledge their real relationship. And Prime didn't think Bumblebee knew. Of course he knew! But _no_, let's let keep forcing the "youngling" to pretend ignorance. Let's continue to preserve the Universe's worst kept secret out of some misplaced feeling of guilt.

Bumblebee forced himself to stand, only to nearly topple over. The only reason he didn't collapse again was because his shoulder met the nearest scrap mound instead. Whatever processes he could scrape together set to work on getting his inner workings back in some semblance of order. The ones he didn't allocate to that end were left to try and get an idea of what in the Pit had just happened.

One moment he was standing guard over Mikaela and Sam – Sam, who for the first time in Bumblebee's recollection was more distraught than he was, distraught and utterly _furious_ – then there was a flare of horrible pain and every other type of sensory feedback. Next thing he knew he'd collapsed and Sam was…

Sam was _gone._

The thought made him jump away from the trash heap holding him up and start scanning the immediate area again. This time, he couldn't blame the results on damaged hardware. In the background, one of the twins shouted or cursed – in surprise and alarm at his erratic behavior, he'd later learn – but he still didn't pay attention. Scan completed, he ran it again, then a third time but each time he couldn't… didn't… _wouldn't_ accept the report. Even the most advanced disintegration weapons always left a trace, and yet he wasn't finding any. Even tuning into the higher phases, the ones that were filled with strange things and stifling energies on every planet except their own – he found nothing.

Despair threatened to bubble over, but the ache in his Spark was still an ache, not agony. The wound where the creator-bond to Optimus once was still flared raw, but the one to Sam was still intact. The relief almost sent him back to his knees, but there was too much else going on.

Someone or something had just tried to blast him apart at atomic level. Him and the humans both – no, it wouldn't have failed for the humans if that was the case, and the bond with Sam was fine. His mind dove through it and followed it… upwards. Astonishment mounted more and more as the link kept rising and rising and rising and…

Bumblebee's processor stalled when he reached the inexplicable conclusion: his charge and bond-brother was in fragging space. How in the…

A space bridge. It had to have been. The Fallen was definitely old enough to know of it.

Barely avoiding a glitch from the shock, he tried to remotely activate the quantum locator Mikaela had agreed to have installed instead of her left-most molar. The relief when he got a response was impossible to describe, but it was short-lived, because she, too, was in bloody orbit.

Inbound comms were coming from several different Autobots, but Bumblebee ignored them all with the single-mindedness of someone who'd lost everything within the span of a single hour, and was about to lose all odds of recovering the last thing that kept him going, kept him fighting for his life in the face of a broken spark bond. Battle protocols he'd never himself used started to be drawn up from scratch, dug up from memory of past lessons stored in the recesses of his spark. Disintegration never really worked on their kind, not when they were made of material that was by nature self-determined on all levels of the material plane. That much, at least, Primus had gotten right. But occasionally a race or other figured out a disintegration ray that could actually put a good enough effort that they felt it.

And yet there'd never been anyone who actually managed to get the concept to a level that could incapacitate them, however briefly. The Fallen must have done something to improve it. Bumblebee supposed he must have been doing _something_ in the eons between his disappearance and the present.

The question would have been why, in the Pit, The Fallen would even bother sending that transmission to the world if he'd been able to do this all along. But the thought didn't even form in the face of the realization that if the bastard was old enough to be familiar with space bridges, then he was also more than old enough to be familiar with dematerialization. And that while it might not work on Cybertronians, it could be a great way to incapacitate Autobots with how low on Energon they all were. Or, rather, were supposed to be, as far as everyone knew.

The knowledge that the Energon problem had been solved failed to lift Bumblebee's spirits for the first time ever, because Sam and Mikaela had been kidnapped from right under his nose. That was what had just happened, Bumblebee thought with a flash of rage that he'd never felt for anyone, not even Megatron.

He paused in his battle software upgrade, then wiped the nascent code clean. He had a different, better option. While Protos – _glad I don't have to call it something dumb like Transformium, Sam had said_ – could be affected by dematerializers, however briefly, Energon could not be destabilized against their will at all. Not unless another one of their kind mixed theirs in and tried their hardest for hours at a time, and only when they were locked in stasis. The substance was as much their lifeblood as it was a vessel of their will, and it worked against any attempt to alter their base makeup even without active application of Diffusion principles.

A martial art which the Autobot knew very, very well.

His spark gave a new pulse, deliberate and far-reaching for once. A third of his energon transmuted from fluid state to energy. It suffused his every particle, every bit of his armor and the protoform beneath. The leftover charge which escaped his body melded with one, final scan of the area. Skids and Mudflap lit up on his now stable HUD like bot-shaped flares. They were both behind him, standing – uncertain and freaked out by him suddenly glowing blue and shooting sparks everywhere, he'd later learn – but his focus had already been captured by something else. Something small, tiny really, which should have stood out on his sensors all along, but for some reason hadn't.

The yellow Autobot crouched and reached down at the rough concrete slab, next to where the Bag of tricks still lied. A simple manipulation of his palm's EM field produced enough of an electro-gravitic charge to lift the tiny Allspark shard from the unseemly dust and into the air.

For a fleeting moment, Bumblebee had the impulse to growl and destroy it out of resentment, but he pushed it aside with an ease that surprised him. Or perhaps it didn't surprise him at all, given that the idea that immediately followed was so much more mad.

The needle-sized piece of metal floated insultingly languid above the bot's palm. Sam had taken to always carrying it around after a month or so following Mission City. Originally he'd been planning to use it as a decoder for rebuilding the Cube from the data anchored in the subspace pockets tied to his neurons – something they were all still trying to figure out the intent behind, or had been before the past's day disaster happened. But Sam ultimately changed his mind. The reason had been one of the few things he ever refused to elaborate on. Something about "weird time shit." Those had been his exact words.

Later, when Orion brought it up while the three of them were having one of their shared Dreams (and the capital was always so important), Sam said that no, his reason and the way he phrased it had nothing to do with any webcomic.

Oh Primus… Metaphysical being or no, the star-shaped kid was just two years old and couldn't survive away from his parents! Unless he'd been swept away on the Astral plane (or some of the upper phases that always gave Bumblebee a processorache when he tuned into them while on Earth), Sam and Mikaela's insubstantial kid was probably with them in Space right now.

_:Orion!:_

There was no direct bond between Bumblebee and him, but they'd become quite adept at using their shared link with Sam to communicate. But Orion still couldn't or wouldn't speak normally, and the sounds, images and impressions relayed now were as far away from reassuring as they could possibly be. Flashes of disorientation, Sam collapsing and _screaming_, a bunch of drones of random size and make swarming them from all over. Orion would have probably relayed more, but their exchange was cut off abruptly.

Bumblebee's spark contracted as the bond link with Samuel clenched in pain. The kind of pain that preceded the death of the person on the other end. Bumblebee would know. He'd lived – _barely –_through that exact experience less than an hour before. Was still living through it now, and steadily losing the bandaid equivalent that Sam had applied to his broken link to Optimus to dull the suffering.

He stared, numbly, at the Allspark shard hovering above his palm.

It was hard to believe that everything from the failed disintegration to the present had happened in the span of a single minute. Bumblebee knew that he should probably think twice about what he was planning. Maybe he should accept the comm link from Jazz at least, since with Optimus' death – Bumblebee's spark clenched every time he thought about it – the saboteur was the only other bot still alive who was in on everything that had been happening on Earth. It would probably help soothe his likely frantic worry, since whatever Skids and Mudflap had told him couldn't have been very encouraging.

But he also knew that he was going to do what he was planning regardless, and second-guessing would only waste time that Sam might not even have.

So before Skids and Mudflap could even balk at what he was doing, Bumblebee jumped to his feet, braced himself, opened his chest hatch as wide as possible and drove the Cube shard straight into his spark chamber in a single move.

Optimus would have reprimanded and made him feel guilty for putting himself at risk without even having to raise his voice. Sam would have needed to put in more effort to make him regret it, given the insane stunts he'd pulled himself, but he'd have still managed it eventually. Especially since he was one of four people who knew that the Allspark had been corrupted and was more liable to turn them crazy and warped beyond help. But reaching escape velocity took a lot of power, and while Bumblebee had the Energon, he doubted it would leave enough to make a difference against the likes of The Fallen and whatever Nemesis knockoff was likely stationed in orbit once he did reach space.

And neither of those two was around anymore to tell him off, now were they?

The cube shard disintegrated and released an immense volume of information he could make no sense of. Then there was the pure, insubstantial Energon once it was past the forcefield and inside the star that was his life. It energized his spark beyond all conceivable limits, but even so the bot felt the malignant strains of will and intent that immediately tried to spread through it. He didn't really have much idea of how to counter it, but it never came down to it. Before he could even doubt the sanity of his despair-driven maneuver, the dark will uncovered something in his Spark, something he'd never known was there at all. Something unique and secret, a potential that had never been realized.

Power unlike anything Bumblebee had ever felt flooded through a backdoor to his soul. It eradicated the imperfection that the Allspark shard had carried. More than that, the power was accompanied by feeling and thought belonging to neither the shard nor himself. Complete surprise was the first thing the yellow autobot distinguished. Surprise that wasn't his own. The next moment was an eternity during which he felt as though he were being examined under a lens, with his every secret, big and small, laid bare. It almost became too much to cope with, but then everything cleared as if by someone undeniable will and his world turned calm, still and painless.

Beyond the backdoor was darkness. Darkness and one long, wide and bright channel of light, at the other end of which was a mind the size of a galactic arm.

"-. .-"

Seeing his would-be guest collapsing with a scream right as he materialized would have been enough of a shock on his own. The explosion of unclassified energy was the second shock in half as many seconds. Harry still managed to raise a shield in front of himself, which led to the third surprise of the past minute: there was no pressure. Some of the electric light did come to a half, but it only faded and flickered to nothing without putting any strain on the protego.

Letting it fade, he noted that Mikaela Banes and Leo Spitz seemed to be fine as well. For a definition of the term at least.

"Sam!" The woman knelt next to a suddenly still – _too _still – Samuel Witwicky and started to check his life signs manually. "Sam, talk to me! What's wrong?" Harry felt honestly terrible at the frantic worry there. It would have behooved him to step forward then, perhaps rush to check what had gone wrong with his intended guest. But he jerked in place when alarms suddenly blared in his head, alerts about the foreign energy flooding the ship's systems and scrambling code. Unknown symbols began to mix with Alteran runes all over the data network.

Silima was already scrubbing and replacing lost software, isolating the symbols for later study or at least pushing them aside as she worked on the essentials. But the precious seconds Harry spent forced to add his mind to the process, to push out the energy that accompanied the data, did their part in eliminating the possibility of him having the first word in what was rapidly becoming the disaster of all first contact situations in the history of ever.

He came back to himself to see Spitz no longer looking around while gasping something in Spanish. The newly-minted student was staring at him. There could have been a number of reasons for that, but the words that came out of the guy's mouth were not what he expected at all.

"Oh, mon dios!" He breathed out, but Harry doubted it was awe at the sight of him for some reason. "Uhm… hey foxy chick…" He said in a strangely detached voice.

"What?" She snapped, half-panicked and half angry, not even looking up from pressing her ear to Sam's chest.

His stare was somewhere between wild and vacant, but his voice was just as numb as before. "Those robots. They into Star Wars or something?"

Some TV show or film, most likely. Despite the situation, he made a note to search the Internet for it later as he took off in a quick stride. The room sensors were still offline, but he didn't need them to know that Witwicky wasn't doing well.

Mikaela Banes wasn't with her back to him, thankfully. She only had to lift her gaze to see him, but her glare made him falter in his step. Even stranger, her stare then switched into something like shock, then stunned surprise and, finally, incredulity.

That was as far as their interaction went, because their attention was arrested by strange and most definitely unwelcome chimes and metallic shearing sounds coming from up ahead. Harry looked past the three humans and couldn't prevent his eyes from going wide at the sight of the nearest crate of nanites moving under its own power. It was changing form like some sort if unholy puzzle. The sight was – alarmingly – mirrored by the restraining array he'd intended to trap the yellow robot in. Blue light and lightning coursed over its surface as it grew poor imitations of limbs and stumbled due to loss of balance.

His danger sense flaring, his eyes snapped back to the crate. Where it had once been a sealed container featuring the lowest of virtual intelligences, the magnetic clasp mechanism of the lid had somehow integrated the main body. Under three pairs of disbelieving eyes – and Witwicky didn't count, as he was insensate – the crate jumped in place and changed into something that might have looked impressive if Harry wasn't completely focused on the sight of two, malicious red eyes.

The danger sense went from code yellow to black in an instant. The rise of fear in both humans made it clear enough that they weren't responsible. "Get down!" Harry yelled as he lunged forward. His jump cleared fifteen feet and ended with a flip that carried him over the startled humans. He landed with his lightsaber already out and moving in an arc. The first swing deflected a plasma ball into the far wall, the second intercepted a beam from a second weapon that had formed on the other makeshift arm of the bizarre creature. Harry couldn't help the flash of outrage at the sight of the thing controlling _his_ nanites. He deflected the next plasma blast straight back, but instead of the crate-bot exploding, the energy just got absorbed.

_Of course_, Harry internally snarled. _Alteran nanites were specifically designed to absorb all type of energy._ When a third plasma beam gun formed on the shoulder of the robot that looked like a lego gorilla. Harry wasn't worried, but instead of lasers the gun released a rapid-fire hail of bullets. He met the first one with his lightsaber blade easily enough, but the result was less fortunate than he expected. Instead of deflecting it, the blade only melted the bullet.

He hissed when the superheated trinium struck his shoulder and managed to eat through the metal nanoweave robe he was wearing, despite the enchantments on it. And when the woman he was protecting made a strangled sound of pain Harry decided that enough was enough. _Protego_. A shield of force formed in front of his outstretched hand. Its surface flickered when the attacks met it, but the strain was manageable. On the left side of the cargo hold, the restraining platform had come alive and was trying to tear itself from the floor, with very limited success. Since it didn't have any weapons out, Harry decided to ignore it in favor of the immediate threat.

Looking over his shoulder, he saw the young woman holding her hand against her bloody shoulder. Despite himself, Harry felt his respect for her rising a few notches. That was a painful wound and she'd barely screamed. And then she reached down to lift her long trouser leg, exposing a handgun sheathed around the ankle.

Well. He'd think twice about showing her his back next time.

Danger nudged his mind, so Harry's gaze snapped back to the mindless enemy, which had, of course, switched targets to the other three organics.

"Oh no you don't!" Not dropping the shield, he clamped a telekinetic hold on it and hurled it into the far wall with his mind.

Or, at least, that had been the original plan. Instead, he was forced to extend the shield in front of the others at the last moment when his attempt at telekinesis did absolutely nothing. "Merlin's balls!" What the hell kind of energy was that that it made them untouchable to telekinesis?

As if in response to his curse, the robot stretched its weird, blocky legs like a sumo wrestler and opened its crate latches on both sides. Spider-shaped bots spilled out even as the weapons fire continued. Extending a finger of his lightsaber hand, he tried to transfigure one into a dead rat (always evoked good memories of Pettigrew, that one) but it didn't work. The blue energy did flare on the surface briefly though. That confirmed one theory.

The robots had little resemblance to Alteran constructors, but they did give Harry a chance to check something he'd always forgotten to test properly. "Well," he said with grim amusement as his shield stayed strong. "I always wanted to test the energy absorption against a lightsaber." Spitz made an odd noise at the back of his throat, but Harry ignored him. He threw his blade forward and it passed through a gap he willed in his shield. It cut through three of the fifteen tech-bugs before they'd cleared even half of the 8 meter distance. Five more met a similar fate, and the others were rent to pieces during the saber's return journey.

Only for the annoyances to reform almost immediately, sans the nanites that had been melted to slag. "Right." So they were intelligent tech bugs. Good to know. "Of course! How could I possibly hope for anything less than the biggest of all first-contact clusterfucks?"

"Can't you just beam them into space?" Witwicky's girlfriend suddenly asked him. Glancing back, he was surprised to see her brandishing her gun one-handed – pretty steady too – in the direction of the crate-bot. She probably wasn't sure the bullets would go through the shield, but she looked determined not to leave Witwicky's side even if it failed. She was an impressive woman, he'd give her that.

"Not at the moment." He wasn't going to tell her that the energy surge from Witwicky had messed up his whole ship. Silima was still struggling to reactivate the essential systems. The silver lining was that the shield generator (which included the cloak),the sublight engine and hyperdrives had gotten through just fine, since they were especially well protected and shielded. Of course, the last two didn't matter much with the navigation systems messed up as they were.

The restraining platform thing (Harry shortened it to RPT for simplicity's sake) had evolved an arm out of one of the force-projection hula circles. And a force-based arm cleaver of some sort. But it was still stuck in place and harmless, despite its huge size.

The first spider-bot had just made it within a foot of the shield. That was his cue, Harry supposed. With a slight push of the hand, the force field rammed forward, pushing along all the bugs. With a mental switch, he got the field to wrap around them and the crate-bot in one, large bubble.

After a moment of deliberation, he opened a momentary gap in the field and sent the strongest cutting curse he could at the crate-bot. Instead of slicing it in half, like it had done every single time to a fully evolved sheet of Vorlon armor, it didn't even leave a scratch. So that confirmed that direct effect spells and powers didn't latch onto them for some reason.

Not showing openly how much that rattled him, he closed his lightsaber and clipped it to his belt. Then he used his now free hand to throw a fireball. He dropped the field but brought another up around the creatures immediately and the resulting explosion. The sound and sight of a fiery eruption was like a balm on his heart. He was just sad that he'd had to keep it sealed, so no wave of hot air wafted over him and his company. It kind of dulled the exhilaration really.

Once the flames died along with the oxygen, he was satisfied to see that the temperature had most definitely lefts molten parts around the edges. He was good with fire. Also, that told him that effects summoned through magic or whatever else were still fair game.

For a moment, Harry considered just holding the things there and running more tests, but Banes was bleeding pretty badly and Witwicky's life force was all over the place. He didn't want him to cause another one of those energy fields before he could get him into a shielded area.

So, brow furrowing, he clenched his extended, open hand into a fist. The force sphere managed to crush all the things together into a tighter ball, but it was mostly because of the fluid characteristics of the nanites. He was only glad they needed to be clumped together in large numbers in order to store any sort of AI. He did not relish the thoughts of little drops and puddles of devil nanites spreading through his ship.

Good. While he couldn't just crush the things, at least it was because Alteran technology was just that tough this time, instead of some inexplicable energy with inherent shielding properties.

That was when the RPT finally managed to pull itself from the floor with a metallic groan.

Harry dropped the shield he was holding around himself and the others, reached for the newborn forcefield-loving robotic beast with his other arm, wrapped it in its own forcefield (he had to stretch his will a bit, due to its sheer size) and threw it through the air until it crashed into the crate-cube / nanite monstrosity. Finally he had all threats contained in the same spot, which meant his left hand was free once more. He already knew what he was going to do.

Lifting his hand to shoulder level, palm-up, he called a very powerful flame in the space above it. The strongest he knew.

This was the biggest and most bizarre thing he'd encountered while researching the strange behavior of magic, and more specifically its behavior away from his planet of origin: Fiendfyre was absurdly, _hilariously_ easy to control in space.

Alas, his plan would not bear fruit. The foreign energy animating what used to be his technology flared like one, single whole and rushed out of the restraining shield like a sole, focused bolt of lightning. The sound of a distant storm echoed around the hold. He snuffed the fiendfyre and threw a forcefield in front of himself and the humans by instinct, only to be stunned when two rifts in space opened on both side of it – no, a _single_ space-time anomaly. Like a tunnel with only the opposite ends. The energy flew through it like one, single, thick arc of bright blue and white light.

It made him whirl around instead of just craning his neck this time, though he didn't cancel the shield, however inadequate. The sight that met him was that of Spitz and Banes shying away from Samuel Witwicky. He was still on his back, but his eyes were half-open, and despite the pain all over his face, the sweat pouring off it, he was absorbing the energy through his outstretched hand.

Harry stared, letting the protego fade along with the attention he'd been devoting to it. If this didn't confirm Witwicky was a different race altogether, nothing would. All that remained was to discover a completely unique internal anatomy and physiology and the conclusion would be irrefutable.

After about six seconds, the last of the energy was syphoned off and the space-time rift closed as well. Harry almost turned around to watch the view accompanying the noises of dead metal crashing into a useless heap. But Witwicky pressed the same hand to the floor and set off different sort of alert in his head. An alert, not an alarm. The energy that had proven slightly more resilient than expected against Silima's purging protocols began to flow back through the ship's systems, along with the malignant code. Flow back and leave the circuits altogether, traveling through the wall, floor and ceiling plating and converging on the palm drawing it back to the source.

On the one hand, Harry was pleased since it meant the Marauder would be back online fully in minutes instead of the hour he'd have had to spend helping the purge along. On the other hand, it meant that he wouldn't have any of that code and energy to study later.

At least he still had the nanites from the relay.

More worrisome was the advanced technopathy Witwicky was showing. He didn't want to think about the implications of the energy allowing him to bypass the DNA lock on Alteran systems, but he couldn't discount the possibility of it given what had just happened. He and him were going to have _words_.

Unfortunately, his thoughts were derailed right after he reached his internal resolution. Once Witwicky finished reclaiming the last of the energy, he gave him a blank look of – what the hell? – exasperated recognition and fell into a dead faint a second time.

"Sam!" The woman shouted, crawling forward on her knees again. "Dammit, Sam, this is the worst possible time!"

Oh bloody hell!

A long jump brought him straight to the guy's side, where he dropped to a knee and laid his hand on his forehead, the other on his chest.

"No! You stay back!" He only stopped because he heard the gun being cocked. Looking up, he glanced at her, then at the barrel of the weapon inches from his face. Really? "I'm only going to make sure he's fine." Mentally keeping the trigger inert, he grabbed her wrist and raised an eyebrow, being more than satisfied when she yelped and dropped the white rabbit she was suddenly holding by the back legs. "Like this." His skin glowed gold with the power of Alteran healing, and then so did hers. Since the makeshift bullet had come out the other side of her shoulder, he only had to heal the damage, which was easily accomplished.

Mikaela gasped and scooted away when he finally let go. Spitz shrieked as he finally gave in to his second panic attack of the day, but he was speaking Spanish so Harry tuned him out. The girl, though, instead of the bouncing bunny was staring at him with that weird shock / recognition mix that was her initial reaction upon seeing him. "I'm just making sure your boyfriend's fine," he told her.

And proceeded to do just that.

Closing his eyes, he mentally dove into his unexpected patient's biological systems. Or tried. He barely had time to notice the bizarre internal makeup – heart in the middle of the chest, both lungs with full lobe sets but the third ones both being smaller – before his impression shifted to a fully visual image of outer space with a star right in front of him. Blue star with golden solar winds and a corona of shifting white energy tendrils not unlike those of an ascended being.

In the Marauder's cargo hold, Harry James Potter was tossed away from Samuel James Witwicky by a burst of electricity supplemented by a wave of force. He crashed on his back with a grunt, several feet away. "Ack! What the bloody… grrmph!" Grunting, he pushed himself from his back to the side, then pulled himself to his knees as the aftershocks faded.

That confirmed the whole different race bit, if nothing else.

Shaking his head, he threw Witwicky a glare but looked up when his girlfriend finally asked the million dollar question. "Who are you? And where are we?" Well, questions.

With a deep sigh – really, the Potter luck was in full swing, couldn't this day end with something other than the disaster of all first-contact situations? – he climbed to his feet and answered. "My name is Harry James Potter." Spitz paused in his panic attack to cry out to his God and start a totally new one. "And you're currently aboard my scout frigate known as the Marauder."

To keep with the theme of her reactions thus far, Mikaela Banes threw her eyes upwards and groaned in something half-way between despair and frustration. The glower she sent him next and the accompanying question was what really threw him for a loop though. "Lift up your fringe."

Harry stared at her.

She stared right back.

Then he slowly, with mounting disbelief he hoped didn't show on his face, did as she asked, revealing the scar he'd never bothered removing.

"Unbelievable." She said flatly, then looked down at her unconscious boyfriend with something equal parts disbelief and annoyance. "Damn you, Sam! 'Weird time shit' does NOT cover this!"

Under circumstances even remotely subject to common sense – because Harry Potter knew better by now than to consider anything about that situation normal – that would have been the perfect opening for a long overdue discussion. But the Potter luck proved to have not run its full course just yet. So instead of getting answers to such questions as, say, _How the hell do you know of me,_ his attention was instead demanded by the Marauder's sensor suite.

The sensor suite that had just come back online at last, and detected a flaming meteor on a collision course with the ship despite it being fully cloaked still.

Flaming meteor located just a mile away and traveling, against all laws of common sense, _upwards_ from the planet below at absurd speeds.

There was barely any time to form a thought by the time the object collided with the shield.


End file.
